My point is I can either do what I am told or not based on my belief that it is a legal order or not. If I do what I am told, hopefully that's the end of it and I don't get my ass beat and the officer moves on from me.
If I don't do what I am told then all bets are off whether I believe the order is lawful or not. Depending on the situation the officer may just move on and ignore me. This is seen all the time in videos where people crowd too close to an officer in the middle of a situation and the officer tells people not involved to step back. Sometimes those officers force people back but many times they don't and the people never actually make space for them.
Another option is the officer can motivate me to comply with the order in any number of ways of which various types and levels of force are some of those ways.
Lastly the officer can view my lack of adherence to their order as some new problem needing to be dealt with and may then go any number of ways with me, up to and including an arrest where force may be used and I am again subject to the possibility that I don't fair well in that exchange.
If I comply in the beginning and if what I was told to do was not legal then I have a means for legal recourse. If I guess what I am being told is unlawful and so I decide to resist or not comply or whatever you want to call it, and it turns out what I was told to do is lawful and thus the subsequent force used against me to either motivate me to comply or arrest me is also lawful, I risk everything with no recourse.
If I don't comply and the order was illegal, then the specifics of what happens after would be used to determine any recourse I may have but that is a gamble I'm personally not looking to take. I am not a constitutional attorney. All the details matter in those situations. Stuff changes too quickly in those situations. I don't see any point in being "right" if the cost to me was a beating, permanent disability, a period of time in a jail or even death.
