There are probably thousands of car stops a day in this country.
A large percentage of them get a simple traffic ticket. It doesn’t make the news.
A large percentage of them are given a warning. It doesn’t make the news.
A much smaller percentage get arrested for a minor offense or warrant. It doesn’t make the news.
A much smaller percentage get arrested for a tiny amount of drugs. It doesn’t make the news.
A very small percentage gets arrested for a large quantity of drugs. That makes the news.
Somewhat off-topic, but in what states is this true?
Everywhere I’ve lived, car insurance covers the car and any drivers authorized by the owner(s), regardless of whether they are specifically named. (Car thieves are not covered, and your insurance company will be having a chat with you if somebody is regularly driving a vehicle on which they are not listed as a named driver, but they still provide coverage.) I’ve never even heard of the cops towing a vehicle solely because the insurance policy did not specifically name the person driving, and I’m not sure how they’d even know in the first place. The standard insurance card issued by State Farm to carry in the vehicle in Kansas, e.g., only has a place for the owner of the policy; it doesn’t list the drivers covered.
I have no idea how they would know either. This state has very strict guidelines about towing uninsured motor vehicles. But all that has to be verified is that the policy is valid and the car is covered.
And don’t have any illnesses or subjectively non-mainstream looks, and so on.
I believe **bob++ **lives in Great Britain. England if I’m not mistaken.
Criminals, as a rule, are monumentally stupid. If you are hauling a trunkload of marijuana, why would you fail to wear a seatbelt to give the cops a reason to pull you over? Then, instead of taking the citation and being on your way, you start talking a mile a minute about random nonsense making the cop suspicious. Then when asked if it is okay to search your trunk, knowing that you have a bunch of weed back there, you readily agree to a consent search. Then, after being properly Mirandized, you confess everything on video to the arresting officer.
Next, of course, you would come to my office asking me to get you out of the charge, or at minimum plead three felonies down to a “fine” that you will never pay anyways. Then your mom will call me and want to talk to me for an hour about how you are a good person who the cops always pick on for no reason and how “trouble always seems to find” you.
Yes, it’s been a long day. 
This happened to me in high school back in Texas! As reported before:
I was in a car where the cop opened the door himself one time. This was in Texas, early 1970s. I was traveling from West Texas to Austin as a passenger in a car that was part of a small convoy. It was my high school’s drama club traveling to Austin to compete in the state play competition. I was just going along for the ride. The girl driving the car – it was hers – was a fellow student, in the front passenger seat was the wife of the drama teacher, and then the backseat had myself and another male student. The convoy got separated, the girl was speeding, and we got pulled over.
The girl asked me to hand her her purse, which was on the backseat floor by my feet, because that’s where her driver’s license was. I handed her the purse, she fished out her license, then she handed the purse to the teacher’s wife. The cop came around to the passenger side, where the wife was, opened the door himself, grabbed the purse and started fishing through it. He said we’d been “passing it around suspiciously.” Turns out she did have a lid of weed there, and the cop found it.
The girl got busted. The only reason the rest of us didn’t was because the teacher’s wife was in the car with us. The girl was from a wealthy family, and the arrest and charges got squashed. The lawyer took my deposition and everyone else’s in the car as to what happened. I know this was Texas and the early 1970s, but the cop was probably still lucky not get sued.
Sorry to continue the hijack -
But around here (Singapore) where we have compulsory insurance and New Zealand (no compulsory insurance) there are a very wide variety of insurance options on offer -
Some of the variations include
a) Named driver only - mostly for high performance cars
b) Named driver + “low risk” extras - eg: over 26, licensed for more than 2 years
c) All authorised drivers
d) Insured driver + family (but not any others)
We also have usage exclusions from one of our insurers
Some of the options they offer when buying the insurance
a) Low mileage
b) Personal use only
c) Drive FOR work use (eg: someone like myself that drives out to visit clients for work)
d) Personal Use + Drive to and from work
The same insurer was in the news for refusing coverage to a family for “fronting” - the “low risk” husband had purchased insurance in his name for a car that his “high risk” wife was using on a daily basis as an “authorised driver”. One of the questions asked during the insurance purchase questionairre was “who is the main driver”. Husband declared main driver as himself, when in practice it was the wife.
I can also remember watching one of those “fly on the wall” cop shows Silent Bob mentions from Pommyland,
The cop reasoning was that those that are careless about minor laws, (ef: Seatbelt) also tend to be careless about bigger laws, which is why they were quite active in stopping cars for such infractions and going from there.
Although I do remember one story about a “professional” drug dealer - they followed him for a very long time, but couldn’t get anything for a pretext stop, particularly mentioning that he was professsional and careful with a well maintained car.
They have certainly been accused of this, at least. It specifically became a serious shit-storm about 15± years back in San Luis Obispo County. They were stopping Latinos driving beat-up old-looking cars and apparently finding pretexts for searching them – often enough to arouse the accusations that they were making a pattern of it. They were furthermore confiscating any unusually large amounts of cash they found, regardless of what other evidence was or wasn’t found as well. They had some kind of logic that cash, per se, was evidence of it being ill-gotten cash.
due to youtube, social media, police cams, people have been riding dirty for a long time your just seeing more busts.Geo profile will get you pulled over in Utah,New Mexico,Nevada,Arizona,etc. with Colorado plates. Guess why?
It always blows my mind when I’ve watched an episode of cops or read a story in the news where a cop pulls someone over, asks permission to search the vehicle and the IDIOT driver knowing full well they have ILLEGAL DRUGS in their car says well oh gee officer of course you can search my car, maybe some of it is people not knowing their rights or police phrasing a request like it’s a demand.
I can’t vouch for this being 100% accurate, but this guy seems to know his law. And he can draw.
I used to work as an EMT and I rode along once with a cop I knew from work. This was in an urban/suburban mostly Latino neighborhood. He pulled a car over and found drugs because the driver himself “tipped off” the cop.
So we pull up behind a car at a stop light and we see the driver looking at us in his rear-view mirror and he adjusts the mirror to get a better look. The cop I’m with says “One.”
The light turns green and as traffic moves forward, the car in front of us changes lanes as soon as he can, so we’re no longer behind him. The cop I’m with says “Two.”
We drift over so we’re behind this guy again, he gives us lots of looks in the mirror, and he turns right onto the next available street. The cop I’m with says “Three” and says to me, “looks like his tail light is out.” (it wasn’t)
He pulls the guy over, walks up and smells marijuana and the rest is history…
The Wolf: About the car, is there anything I need to know? Does it stall, smoke, make a lot of noise? Is there gas in it? Anything?
Jules: Aside from how it looks, the car is cool.
The Wolf: Positive? Don’t get me out there on the road, I find out the brake lights don’t work.
Jules: Man, far as I know, the motherfucker’s tiptop.
The Wolf: Good enough. Let’s go back to the kitchen. [the three men leaves]
Surprised this didn’t come up: Parallel construction
Apparently, the DEA uses the NSA database to search for conversations that pertain to drugs, and learn that Joe Schmoe is driving around with drugs in his car. The DEA then tips off the local police. The local police can’t use federal dragnet surveillance on US citizens as evidence in court, so they make up something else, like “Your license plate is crooked – and also I smell weed.”
I went down to Fort Worth Grass and Stone a few weeks ago and bought ten 2’ x 5’ rolls of Tiff 419 Bermudagrass sod to lay down in my backyard. I had more grass in the back of my car than Nate Newton!
In 40 years when marijuana is legal in Texas I bet “Fort Worth Grass and Stone” will be a valuable trade name but selling a different product than they do now.
Former narcotics detective (NJ) here. Early in my career I attended some training put on by a certain agency that had these interdiction stops down to an art/science (it is a bit of both). Anyway, they told us to look for northbound cars with Florida “rental”'plates driven by hispanic males. IIRC, Florida rental plates all started with the Letter R or something. Find a traffic violation and make the stop. Talk to the occupants and develop probable cause. This wasn’t that hard to do as the stories of the “dirty” occupants didn’t match, the driver often didn’t know who rented the car, they didn’t know exactly who they were going to " visit" in NY - usually a friend or cousin they couldn’t name, etc. Conduct a warrant-less search based upon PC or ask for a consent (verbal only at the time & no reasonable articulable suspicion required).
The drugs are found, big seizures & headlines the local prosecutor lets them plea to a one year term and, I think, a $25,000 fine. It later became known that the higher-ups in the smuggling operation promised to pay the fine and some sort of bonus to anyone who got caught and kept their mouth shut. In my opinion, most of the mules knew they were hauling drugs but didn’t know exactly what or how much. They were told, “Pick up a car here and drop it there.”
Years later said agency entered into a consent decree and stopped profiling, got dash cams in all their cars etc. That said, it was an effective technique as large seizures became commonplace on a certain few miles of roadway.
Thanks, MikeF. Interesting stuff.
Admittedly allowed a single anecdote to confrim my suspicion, but I recall sitting in a barber shop with a front row view on the traffic stop on the street outside. White kid around 20 was stopped near a college, apparently for a traffic violation. (My guess is a plate/registration infraction, as he had to park the car after the stop and get picked up.)
Cop appeared to ask consent to search, and driver declined. Obviously no aroma or visible roach in the ashtray, as he had to wait for backup with a dog to arrive. When the dog arrived, it sure appeared to this nonexpert that the handler was working awfully hard to get it to react, but it didn’t. Dog and handler departed, and original cop issued the citation.
Even small town forces have canine units - might as well look for chances to use them. And heck, if you score, property forfeiture gives the department free money!
What percentage of cars do you think have illegal drugs in them? Even if it is really low, if you search each stop, you can run up some serious coin in terms of fines, forfeitures, and arrest stats. And those can be used to request increased budgets and manpower.
I sure have a hard time considering conset to be non-coerced when one party is wearing a gun, and the alternative is sitting on the side of the road for who knows how long waiting for the dog. Not a big fan of the consistent longtime trend in law regarding stops and searches.