-
Yes. Minors generally have the same rights as adults. For example, minors can refuse searches and decline to answer questions without an attorney present. Nevertheless, minors face unique challenges when attempting to exercise these rights...
-
No. If a police officer asks your permission to search, you are under no obligation to consent. The main reason why officers ask is because they don't have enough evidence to search without your consent. Don't expect an officer to tell you of your right not to consent. Any time you consent to a search request you are naively waiving your constitutional rights.
-
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...
-
No. We teach people that they have rights, and that these rights are secured by the principal documents that guarantee our civil liberties -- the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. An informed individual who invokes his constitutional protections is doing exactly what our nation's founders intended. They created these documents to...
-
Everyone should be trained to assert their constitutional rights under the 4th Amendment in order to avoid the hassle and humiliation of police misconduct and illegal searches. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics report on citizen-police contacts...
-
No. The courts have made it clear that police officers do not have to tell people that they can refuse to consent to a warrantless search. Also, contrary to the belief perpetuated by popular police television shows, a person will not be read their rights subsequent to being taken into custody. A person only needs to be Mirandized when...
-
Generally not. The Bill of Rights protections that matter most during police encounters are mandated by the U.S. Constitution as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court, and all states are required to follow them. States can offer more protection of these rights, but not less. There are some variations regarding...
-
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, police may sometimes search you even if you refuse consent. If they find anything illegal, you'll have to get a lawyer and fight it out in court, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the search will hold up...
-
As a general rule, searches conducted without a valid search warrant signed by a judge violate the Fourth Amendment, but like most rules of law, there are a number of explicit exceptions. In fact, most searches occur without warrants because police take advantage of these exceptions to the Fourth Amendment...
-
The sad fact is that most people believe that they are under some kind of obligation to acquiesce when an officer contacts them and asks permission to search them or their belongings. The truth is exactly the opposite...
-
This is a tricky issue. The simple answer is that citizens who are minding their own business are not obligated to "show their papers" to police. In fact, there is no law requiring citizens to carry identification of any kind. Once you get passed the surface, however, things get much more complicated...
-
No. The Supreme Court has never ruled that police must present the warrant when performing a search. The purpose of the warrant is to...
-
No. We believe that most police officers are good, hardworking people who are doing a tough job. We need police to safeguard the life, liberty, and property of all people. To do this best, police officers should...
-
Your rights do not disappear if the officer threatens to call in the dogs, so don't let this all-too-common tactic intimidate you into consenting to a search. You have several options...
|
Police Contact With The Public |
 |
 |
 |
|
Analysis of an LAPD report documenting traffic stop data between July 1 and November 30, 2002 reveals that 99% of drivers stopped by police in Los Angeles consented to officers' search requests. The report also shows that 7.4% of African American drivers and 5.3% of Hispanic drivers stopped by police were asked for permission to be searched, while only 1.5% of white drivers were asked for consent to search.
Source: "POSTING MOTOR VEHICLE AND PEDESTRIAN STOP DATA", Los Angeles Police Department, 2002
The following statistics come from the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics report, Contacts between Police and the Public (February, 2001):
- An estimated 43.8 million people age 16 years or older, or about 21% of the population in that age group, had at least one face-to-face contact with the police during 1999. About 52% of these interactions were during traffic stops.
- About 19.3 million drivers, or about 10.3% of licensed drivers, were stopped by police. Among those, about 1.3 million motorists said they or their vehicle had been searched, and in almost 90% of those searches, police found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
- Of the 1.3 million searches of motorists, the likelihood of police finding criminal evidence was not significantly different between the 845,000 searches without consent (12.9%) and the 427,000 searches with consent (14.2%).
- During a traffic stop, police were nearly twice as likely to carry out some type of search on an African-American (11.0%) or Hispanic (11.3%) than a white motorist (5.4%).
- Searches of white drivers or their vehicles were more than twice as likely to find evidence of criminal activity (17%) than searches of black drivers (8%).
- Of the nearly 1.3 million drivers who experienced either a vehicle search, a driver search, or both, about 66% did not feel it was for a legitimate reason.
- Persons age 18 to 19 had a per capita rate of contact arising from a motor vehicle stop of 225 per 1,000, which is more than four times the rate of traffic stops experienced by those ages 50 or older.
Limitation of the survey's search data: Because the survey only asked drivers about any searches that the police may have conducted during a traffic stop, it does not provide data showing the number of traffic stops in which a driver had refused an officer's request to conduct a search and no search was made. Consequently, the survey cannot estimate: 1) how often a driver refused a request to conduct a search; 2) the likelihood of police conducting a search after the driver denied permission; or 3) the likelihood of a driver giving consent.
Share this with the world:         
|
|
What are we doing?
The 4th Amendment Podcast
|
|
