How to Flex Your Rights During Police Encounters

A traffic stop can be stressful and terrifying -- especially if you're not prepared. These rules will help protect your rights and improve your odds of driving away safely.

Always Be Calm & Cool
If police flag you down, pull over immediately, turn off your car, and place your hands on the wheel. Police like to see your hands for their own safety -- so wait until they request your paperwork before reaching for it. At night, it's also a good idea to turn on the dome light, so the officer can see you're not armed.

Always greet policemen and policewomen as "Officer". For example, you may start off with "Good afternoon, Officer. How's it going today?" Under no circumstances should you ever talk back, raise your voice, or use profanity with a police officer. Being hostile with police is stupid and dangerous. You can't win that game.

If the officer writes you a ticket, accept it quietly and never complain. Listen to any instruction on paying the fine or contesting the ticket, and drive away slowly.

Clip from the DVD, 10 Rules for Dealing with Police

A traffic stop can be stressful and terrifying -- especially if you're not prepared. These rules will help protect your rights and improve your odds of driving away safely.

Always Be Calm & Cool
If police flag you down, pull over immediately, turn off your car, and place your hands on the wheel. Police like to see your hands for their own safety -- so wait until they request your paperwork before reaching for it. At night, it's also a good idea to turn on the dome light, so the officer can see you're not armed.

Always greet policemen and policewomen as "Officer". For example, you may start off with "Good afternoon, Officer. How's it going today?" Under no circumstances should you ever talk back, raise your voice, or use profanity with a police officer. Being hostile with police is stupid and dangerous. You can't win that game.

If the officer writes you a ticket, accept it quietly and never complain. Listen to any instruction on paying the fine or contesting the ticket, and drive away slowly.

Clip from our DVD, 10 Rules for Dealing with Police

While police generally need a warrant to search you or your property -- during a traffic stop, police only need probable cause to legally search your vehicle. Probable cause means police must have some facts or evidence to believe you're involved in criminal activity.

Clip from the DVD, 10 Rules for Dealing with Police 

In other words, an officer's hunch without evidence of illegal activity is not enough to search your car. Before searching, he must observe something real. Common examples of probable cause include the sight or smell of contraband in plain view or plain smell, or an admission of guilt for a specific crime. The presentation of any of these facts would allow an officer to perform a search and make an arrest.

Be aware that minor traffic violations (e.g. speeding, broken tail-light, or expired registration) are not considered probable cause.

Traffic stops typically occur as a result of suspected moving violations committed by the driver of the vehicle. Passengers cannot be held responsible for the driver’s conduct and are generally free to leave, unless police become suspicious of them during the course of the stop.

Unfortunately, this happens frequently and the amount of evidence required to detain passengers is minimal. For this reason, passengers must remember to refuse search requests and refrain from answering questions without an attorney present. Police who suspect criminal activity will often separate the occupants of an automobile and question them separately. If their stories differ, this could lead officers to claim that they have probable cause to prolong the detention or conduct a search.

As with any other brief detention, the best way to handle this situation is to determine if you can leave by asking "Officer, are you detaining me, or am I free to go?"

During a legitimate traffic stop, police may order the driver and any passengers out of the vehicle. This rule is intended to protect officers' safety, but it's often used for investigatory purposes. Police who order you out of the vehicle probably suspect you of criminal activity, so be prepared for a pat-down and maybe a search request.

This is one of the smartest 4th Amendment decisions I've seen in a while:

Horrifying videos of police tasering people are finding their way onto the internet with alarming frequency as of late. This one from Utah has caused quite a stir:

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court stood up for the 4th Amendment with a forceful unanimous ruling in Brendlin v. California:

New DOJ data confirming that minorities receive harsher treatment than whites during traffic stops came as no surprise to us. Last week I discussed the study, warning that DOJ's poor reporting could embolden racial profiling apologists, despite the obvious disparities revealed in the data. Unfortunately, I was right.

Profiling skeptic Steve Chapman now exploits DOJ's report in a widely published editorial that's as sloppy as it is wrong:

Why would black drivers be arrested more often? Maybe because African-Americans commit crimes at a far higher rate and are convicted of felonies at a far higher rate. In 2005, for instance, blacks were nearly seven times more likely to be in prison than whites.

This is textbook circular reasoning of the sort that will earn you an F in Philosophy 101. By Chapman's logic, police could stop investigating white people entirely and we'd soon see that minorities commit 100% of all crimes.

By relying on the argument that increased searches of minorities are justified by their criminality, Chapman exposes his own unfamiliarity with the data he's discussing. The previous DOJ report, released in 2005, addresses this issue directly:

Likelihood of search finding criminal evidence

Searches of black drivers or their vehicles were less likely to find criminal evidence (3.3%) than searches of white drivers (14.5%), and somewhat less likely than searches of Hispanic drivers
(13%).

This data comes straight from a report referenced by Chapman, yet he insists that "a motorist of felonious habits is also more likely to have illegal guns or drugs on board," and "the average black driver is statistically more likely to be a criminal than the average white driver."

The great irony here is that Chapman offers his made up statements about the heightened criminality of minorities while arguing that racial profiling doesn’t exist. His premise fundamentally endorses profiling and any officer who agrees with him is highly vulnerable to the exact behavior Chapman denies. It is really just priceless to find gratuitous racial stereotypes in an article about how the days of gratuitous racial stereotyping are behind us.

A new report from the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) shows that black and Hispanic drivers are significantly more likely to be searched, arrested and subjected to the use of force than whites.

It was initially encouraging to see the DOJ release this year's report without any shenanigans considering what happened last time:

The Justice Department intervened, insisting that BJS not publicize that nasty part about minority drivers being more likely to be searched, arrested, handcuffed, beaten, maced, or bitten by dogs.

A conflict emerged in the course of which BJS Director Lawrence A. Greenfeld was removed from his post. His attempt to provide the media with an unbiased summary of his agency’s findings was apparently too much for his superiors at the DOJ. Ultimately, no press release was sent out, and the study was unceremoniously posted in the bowels of the BJS website.

Perhaps it's a sign of progress and lessons learned that DOJ declined to bury this year's equally shocking findings. After all, covering up racial profiling is one way – however shameful and undignified – of admitting that it exists.

Yet, upon closer inspection, we find that this year's BJS report omits the single most important piece of information contained in the previous report: hit-rate data showing whether minorities were more likely to be hiding contraband.

Likelihood of search finding criminal evidence

Searches of black drivers or their vehicles were less likely to find criminal evidence (3.3%) than searches of white drivers (14.5%), and somewhat less likely than searches of Hispanic drivers
(13%).

This revealing fact fundamentally undermines the sole premise from which police agencies and others have sought to defend ongoing racial disparities such as those revealed this week. Consider the following hypothetical (but really quite typical) debate with a racial profiling apologist:

RPA: There's no such thing as racial profiling. Cops don't even know the race of the driver until after they've made the stop.

Me: Who gets pulled over is only one part of the equation. The data show that minority drivers are more likely to be searched, arrested, and subjected to the use of force after being stopped…

RPA: Well, if that's true it's because those people committed more crimes.

Me: Actually, the data show that searches of white people are more likely to produce evidence of a crime.

RPA: Wow, you must have gotten straight A's at the Al Sharpton Academy of Social Science.

Me: This data comes from the Department of Justice.

RPA: Hang on, I'm getting a call. Oh yeah, gotta take this. Good talk.

DOJ was able to provide a racial breakdown of hit-rates in its previous report (the one it buried) thus the omission of such information from this week's report is highly conspicuous. And of course, DOJ's previous attempts to cover up racial profiling data attest to the agency's lack of candor and credibility on this issue.

The larger question then is why the Department of Justice seeks to downplay racial profiling in the first place. BJS reports primarily reflect the behavior of local law-enforcement agencies, not the feds. The only real embarrassment here for DOJ is its ongoing failure to provide adequate monitoring of police practices at the state level. An activist such as myself may be keenly aware of DOJ's abdication of this responsibility, but I suspect that most people are not.

In any case, we'd be hard pressed to generate any further controversy surrounding cover-ups at the Department of Justice this season. Instead, let's do our best to make sure everyone knows how to handle police encounters. No matter how thorough, a traffic stop report from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics won't save your ass on the New Jersey turnpike anyway.