Tracking traffic stops in CA

So, I get asked a lot of weird criminal law questions because I’m a lawyer. I don’t do criminal law, so I don’t answer them. However, someone asked me a question this weekend, and I’m curious.

Apparently, the fellow was pulled over on his way home. He had been drinking (but he swears he wasn’t drunk). The cops made him get out of the car and do all the drunk tests, but they didn’t give him a breathalyzer. They let him go with a warning to make sure he was sober when he was driving.

So, that’s the story as he told it to me. What he wants to know is if the stop will be in some database somewhere, so if he gets pulled over again (:rolleyes:) the cops will know that he’s been stopped before on suspicion of drinking. This isn’t an area of law I deal with and my google-fu isn’t working. We’re in Los Angeles, and the stop was in the City of Los Angeles proper, but he says it was CHP who pulled him over.

If you don’t want to directly answer the question, you can just post a link and I can figure it out myself. I’m not planning to tell this dude anything, it’s just something I thought was interesting.

Note to avoid potential hijack: Even though he’s not my client, I did advise him that drinking and driving is against the law, and he should figure out a way to make sure he’s not driving drunk. But, if being pulled over by the cops didn’t scare the crap out of him, I doubt anything I would say is going to.

Knowing what I know about cops some other place, there’s probably not a written record of it, which doesn’t mean that some cop or another won’t be on the lookout for this guy some other time.

I did some ride-alongs a few years ago. Those guys (and gals) keep a sort of informal internal database about where the trouble spots are, and who lives there, and whether they’ve added a new resident or moved someplace else. Not surveillance, but caution and alertness.

And certain things are red flags to cops that a civilian would never, ever think of. Much more than they told me, I’m sure.

Don’t know about L.A… But around here it will be on the individual departments computer and will come up as a contact the next time he’s run. This comes up on the squads mobile data terminal but will also come up on the dispatchers screen who can also relay the info to an officer who doesn’t have a data terminal (like an officer on a bicycle or foot patrol). This info usually remains in house and is not routinely shared with other agencies. There are too many stops to share each individual contact. But the info is usually public information. You can go into a PD and ask to see the public access computer. By running a name (or an address) you can see what contacts a person (or persons at the address run) have had with that particular department.

I would think that there would be a record every time a driver license record is queried and depending on how the system is set up who queried it and what terminal was was queried from.

There should also be records when they ran the license plate. A really modern system might even have a GPS location, but I don’t know if any police systems are that modern.

In Minneapolis, this is not informal – there is a computerized program called Codefor that keeps records on locations, and all citizen complaints, police calls, arrests, etc. at that specific location (regardless of whether there was ever an arrest or a criminal charge).

This database is used for 2 purposes:
[ul]
[li]provides additional information for police when they are called to a location[/li][li]allows analysis looking for patterns in an area[/li][/ul]

This has been interesting. I think I’ll go see what my record is. I’ve gotten a few speeding tickets before.

I wonder. He did mention that one of the cops who was running his license came back and said to the other cop that there was “nothing there” or something like that. I assumed that was a warrant check, but now I’m wondering if that was also a check for previous stops.

You know, it may not have been informal for the cops in my ride-alongs, either. They had onboard computers. However, they were not consulting them as they told me all that stuff.

We also went on a couple of calls that were just plain weird (a lady who said her landlord was stealing her towels, a woman who said her sister-in-law smooshed her face while they were arguing) and I didn’t see any notes being typed in about them afterwards. Although the towel lady was known to them from previous calls. Bless her heart.