It's not luck, it's survivor bias on the reporting.
He probably pulls 20-100 [0] people over every day. All of those checks are unconstitutional. Once every 1-100 days one of them has something worth going to court over. Most of those will be plea-bargained and never reach a judge. If it's sufficiently serious, though, it's worth the fight in court. So the judge will only see the really serious cases.
And we're only seeing the reporting because the judge did something unusual and ruled the entire operation unconstitutional.
So it's not "wow! those cops really know their business; they pulled over the one person carrying meth!". It's "wow! out of thousands of illegal, unconsitutional, vehicle stops, one person got taken to court and put in front of a judge, and that case was thrown out"
[0] I have no idea on actual numbers. The point still holds.
Well, had the officer not been lucky, he'd've opened the trunk and found nothing. The stop would presumably end there¹, and so too would any discussion of the legality of the stop unless the person whose rights had been violated had the time and resources to pursue the violation "on the principle of the matter"… not something I think most people are going to have the resources to do.
So I wonder if we could be seeing a bit of survivorship bias.
California plates. I was pulled over and searched years ago in Kansas for the same reason.
In this case, the Flock data then showed a bunch of recent interstate travel, which cops consider to be probable cause. They know it’s not legally probable cause though, so they pointed to her “nervousness” (aka not consenting to search).
The real question is how many times the same cop pulled over people who he searched and found nothing. Certainly nonzero.
This nervousness excuse is crap too. This is a natural response towards LEO. Do they not understand what they represent is fear to manu parts of our society?
Imagine your innocent wife, mother, daughter, aunt, coworker, while 1. She’s trying to drive across a large vast section of America. Gets stopped by cops late night in stinky west texas. They remove her from her car , into theirs, for interrogation. Would she be nervous?
If I can be shot dead for being pulled over for a broken tail light, or for reaching into a pocket for the driving licence the cop just requested me to produce, or being robbed from all my cash and debit cards without reason, or jailed based on the wrongly conducted roadside "drug" analysis of my donut, yeah, I have every right to be nervous.
Cops are definitely not my friend, I fully expect them to lie, fabricate "evidence" and look for any excuse to cause problems, and it's all on them.
All these examples have been widely reported nationwide, some worldwide. No need to even dig through the local reporting.
Are you saying there have been no cases when the "routine" traffic stop resulted in the cop killing an unarmed civilian still sitting in the car?
Or maybe that roadside "drug testers" are solid so when the untrained rookie uses a tiny piece of glazing to "check for drugs", the use is according to the manual and thus gives no false positives? John Oliver has a very good video on that.
Cops are no-ones friend and the multiple examples from the bodycams proved exactly that.
That’s an absurd statement. I’m an upstanding citizen who’s never been arrested and I’ve gotten extremely nervous every time I have ever been pulled over.
Do you only derive anything about police officers, from any kind of footage?
I bet you don't watch police bodycam footage where they go about their duties, help people or detain dangerous criminals risking their own lives and limbs.
I have seen such footage, and I’m glad some officers take their job seriously.
But unless you know a way to tell apart those who abuse their power from those who don’t, I have to consider all officers as antagonistic and potentially dangerous.
You see, if I’m wrong, then I could end up in jail or injured or dead while they get paid leave.
> help people or detain dangerous criminals risking their own lives and limbs.
As we’ve seen them feeling afraid for their life is justification enough to kill you. It makes the risking life and limb part less admirable.
Bad cops aren’t necessarily bad on every call or interaction. They pick their moments or sometimes maybe just make bad decisions.
Back to the example at hand, this woman alone in her car at night in a rural/isolated area. This is a comparable situation as a baby gazelle separated from the herd and surrounded by lions. They really have no power to control the situation if the officers want to do whatever they want.
Anecdotally, a story we see on the news often enough to justify the nervousness. I had a distant family member, a step-uncle I think, when I was younger. He was a constable or something. He drove a cop car and had the uniform but my understanding was he just had a desk job. This was late 80s/early 90s, so different tech landscape and basically was no record of his behavior. But I guess after 50+ complaints, there was an investigation and he lost his job. Turned out he would perform traffic stops with his car, to only single female drivers, then would coerce them into a sexual act. Basically, give me a BJ and I won’t give you a ticket. I don’t know if it was fully consensual but I know back then it was just his word versus theirs and only when the volume of complaints was high enough his superiors decided to fire him. No criminal investigation, or I would say nothing more than just quietly letting him go. The family only found out because it ended with a divorce and my aunt and cousins had to live with the fallout from that. I think it was buried from the media but I was young so maybe it was public and I just don’t know. We were in a big city so it wasn’t big enough to be a tv news story.
LOL my dude go see if cops in other developed countries kill civilians at the rate US cops do! Germany even has a Wikipedia page for people killed by cops because it's so little.
Sure, part of the reason is German cops have far better training, and are more accountable, but there is also the incredibly sophisticated practice of not requiring a police stop for a simple speeding infraction. You get the fine per mail. That's it.
Same for me with Washington plates in Minnesota. It took the police officer several minutes tailing me to think of an excuse to pull me over. It ended up being the parking tag I had hanging from my rear view mirror that necessitated searching my car.
To be fair, you're going to be a target with Washington, Oregon, or Colorado plates anywhere in the USA. Best if you fly those tags to have a really nice car.
Cast a big enough trawl net and you'll catch a fish. No surprise there. But, you'll also destroy the ocean floor and kill dolphins. Many cars are being stopped using Flock every day. And many police officers are engaging in petty corruption, like stalking exes or doing unconstitutional searches.
You can tell 100 people in a day that you pulled them over specifically. And you'd be technically correct. With training to always act as if you're being recorded, it gets a lot easier to say with a straight, serious face.
It just doesn't necessarily mean anything, instead of hiding a secret reason -- which is what a statement like that is often intended do: make someone feel anxious, nervous, and vulnerable.
LPR will scan thousands of cars automatically, but he stated in the footage that he chose her specifically. Why?