sitting alone in a parked car is not a crime.
Parking your car in the grass of a public park is a crime. The police had the right to ticket him/question him. Regardless, the point is that in the video he acts like a complete, combative jerk. The officer was very professional and polite. And Arbery was being combative. Sorry, but normal people don’t react to the police this way. This video answers the question as to why Maud ran at the guy with the shotgun. He was a mentally unbalanced, combative jerk.
Loitering in a public park known for illicit activity at odd hours is going to attract the attention of law enforcement. That he was driving on a suspended license raised even further suspicion that this was not your typical law abiding citizen. I’m no great fan of police in the modern era, they’ve gotten paramilitarized and often enter into any interaction with an adversarial mindset from the very outset. But, keeping an eye on potential hotspots for illegal activity and questioning the presence of suspicious individuals is in my opinion a legitimate function of law enforcement.
You make the classic YouTube lawyer mistake of thinking that the police are required to have suspicion of a “specific crime” to make contact with someone. They don’t. An officer can initiate contact with anyone l, anywhere at any time without any suspicion at all. They can’t detain you or force you to talk to them but they can go up to anyone, anywhere without any reason at all and start a voluntary encounter.
If the officer possesses reasonable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot, they can make a terry stop. Contrary to YouTube lawyer speak, that does not require suspicion of a “specific” crime.
The courts consider all of the totality of the circumstances in determining if reasonable suspicion exists, and the threshold is not difficult to reach.
A person sitting alone in a car might be entirely innocent. A person sitting alone in a car in an open air drug market who is unusually nervous, making furtive movements and who acts in an aggressive manner when initially contacted can provide officers with reasonable suspicion to initiate a terry stop.
You need to actually read Terry v Ohio. Walking up and down a street sidewalk several times, looking in a store window and talking to two other people on a street are not criminal offenses either, yet that set of facts provided the officer with the reasonable suspicion to stop and frisk.
But it does raise suspicion of illegal behavior. the police have a right to investigate.