I often see reports of a drug bust that starts with a “routine” stop for some minor traffic violation, and the police then discover drugs hidden in the car (here’s one and here’s two more that all happened in the last week in Oregon). It seems like I see one at least every few months for someone caught speeding on I-5 here.
What’s going on with these? Is it just really good policing where the police notice something is off? Blind luck? Racial profiling*? Or are the cops often tipped off and are looking for the specific car, and the “traffic violation” is kind of a sham?
I have an acquaintance who is a cop. He claims that his biggest drug bust was due to a burnt out license plate light! That allowed him to pull over the car. In such situations he normally just talks to the driver and usually gives them a verbal warning to fix the light. However if the driver acts strangely or is too nervous, he asks if he can inspect the car. If the driver refuses, he then decides if it’s worth bothering a judge to get a warrant.
The lesson here is if you are going to do anything illegal while driving a car follow the rules of the road and make double sure that the vehicle is in great shape including all lights, valid plates, good tires, and so on.
In some states, maybe most, you can ask for consent to search a car for no reason at all. Often people will give consent. In my state there needs to be a reasonable articulable suspicion before even asking.
I’d think that lesson is blindingly obvious by now, I’m surprised so many are stopped and found out unless there was some prior knowledge by the cops. Maybe it’s just a sign of how dumb the runners are and how much meth is moved through this state.
Loach, I was hoping you’d see this thread. In your experience, did these kind of stops ever happen based on prior knowledge, or is it really always a matter of luck and good policing?
Some reason they stopped this particular car, other than the traffic violation. Maybe a tip, maybe it’s a known vehicle, maybe they stop every Latino male driving up I-5 from California.
Originally Posted by JerrySTL:
“The lesson here is if you are going to do anything illegal while driving a car follow the rules of the road and make double sure that the vehicle is in great shape including all lights, valid plates, good tires, and so on.”
Obviously, the lesson does not account for the fact that one doesn’t have to be doing anything unlawful (or for there to be some other issue with the car) for a cop to successfully claim there was a legitimate reason to pull over the car. And sometimes you don’t even have to pull someone over. A recent court opinion (to cut to the chase, no matter how bad the State wanted the situation to be viewed differently, Fourth Amendment protections applied … at least unless/until the Court of Appeals says otherwise):
For one there better be at least a Reasonable Articulable Suspicion to stop the car. And yes all our stops are taped. That is not 100% throughout the country but it is becoming more and more standard practice.
Most of the time when there is a target car it is part of a larger investigation. There is already a warrant in place. Even with a tip we are not allowed to search a car without consent or a warrant. Getting a tip about a car and then not getting consent is a waste of time.
My state is not big on pretext stops. If our judges feel you were looking for something petty just to get in the car you will most likely get everything thrown out at a suppression hearing. That is not to say if you see a frequent customer driving that you can’t observe him for a while and pull him over for a valid reason. When you get up to the car you may see something or you may not. But you need RAS to even ask for consent to search.
My state is stricter than the restrictions that SCOTUS has in place. Each state will have their own practices. The baseline is the case law at the federal level but that does not mean it is standardized. SCOTUS rulings are the minimum standard.
From your OP the main reason why drug arrests come from routine car stops is because people are stupid. Many druggies don’t really plan very well. Most criminals are on the left side of the bell curve.
It’s simply the (case) law (of the land), developed by court decisions. Like many parts of the law, you won’t see this sort of thing explicitly written in a statute.
At any rate, what the law does or does not require won’t prevent a person from doing X. For purposes of this discussion, what is supposed to be won’t prevent a police officer from fabricating a given piece of evidence (e.g., declare the person was violating Y rule of the road when (s)he was not). Whether or not the cop is fully aware and educated about what will be required to pass legal challenge is a factor. Luckily, a decent number don’t have that knowledge and, sometimes a matter of luck but usually a matter of $$$$, sometimes the party on the receiving end has a decent lawyer. (Whether a cop or a lawyer or a judge or a prosecutor, rather unfortunately, people in those positions are no more or less likely to be ethical and good at their job than any other person.)
I thought that was actually part of the profile. If it’s a car in perfect shape traveling exactly the speed limit on a major drug trafficking highway, and the occupants meet some kind of ethnic profile, you probably just found a car riding dirty…
Around here, there’s lots of drug busts because of routine traffic stops, but they never ascribe any to confidential informants. Suspicious, in my opinion.
I wasn’t so much worried about whether the cops are making anything up. If I wanted to, I could probably stop any car on the interstate with a valid reason - going 5 mph over the limit, changing lanes without signaling, weaving, whatever. The heart of my questions is really, were all these people pulled over solely because they were violating a law? And did the officer become suspicious and initiate a search solely because of the driver’s actions or what they said? Or was there something else that tipped them off, and the traffic stop was a pretext?
“Highway interdiction” is the term you often hear for when local and state cops do a lot of routine traffic stops in high drug-trafficking corridors with the specific intent of finding drugs or drug money. If you just punch that term into google, you’ll get some links that will give you a good idea of both the sorts of things cops look for and the various reasons why it’s a very controversial tactic.
The various federal agencies that run programs that encourage highway interdiction tactics are pretty adamant that the local agencies should only act on actual intelligence and not profiling (especially racial profiling) in deciding who to pull over, but that clearly isn’t always the case. Another very controversial aspect of it is that until some very recent rule changes, for some agencies the big attraction of highway interdiction was the opportunity to seize cash and cars belonging to drug traffickers. So if you happened to be driving through one of those jurisdictions in an expensive car and maybe not quite fitting the appearance of the sort of law-abiding person who might drive such a car, you’d probably draw some scrutiny there.
I think we’re missing a much simpler explanation: selection bias.
Cops pull a lot of people over. Traffic stops and other routine stops are happening all over the country all of the time. Given any reasonably large population of drug users, you’ll be pulling a large number of them them over by pure chance. Given that a decent subset of them are going to be stupid about what they leave lying around or their physical presentation, you’d expect a fairly large number of these “coincidental” discoveries without ever having to look to informants, planting of evidence, or profiling of any kind (although no doubt all those happen from time to time, too).
Wrong. it is not the law of the land. It is the law in New Jersey only. It is a state appellate court decision. “Law of the land” (regardless of weird parentheses) implies it is the law for the entire country.
If the fly-on-the-wall cop programmes over here are any guide, the police will often have information that a particular car is associated with drugs in some way. If they make a run for it, so much the better but they have shown us where a totally innocent guy just happens to have bought the ‘wrong’ car.
Traffic cops often make the point, frequently supported by subsequent events, that a poorly maintained car often has more wrong than meets the eye - often the car is insured but not for the guy driving it (in most cases a private car insurance names the drivers covered - anyone else is not insured and the car may be towed), or they will smell cannabis and that allows them to call up the sniffer dogs.
On the downside, there have been cases where a driver has been stopped dozens of times for no apparent reason - it has turned out that he annoyed some cop and they flagged his car.
A recent court opinion (to cut to the chase, no matter how bad the State wanted the situation to be viewed differently, Fourth Amendment protections applied … at least unless/until the Court of Appeals says otherwise):