[TKDietz]

The problem is not that a person is found with drugs. The problem is that for every person that is found carrying drugs there are several more who are harassed and treated like criminals.

Look, I live in an area with a stretch of highway that is basically a "drug trap," like you have speed traps in lots of other places. Law enforcement patrol the interstate in great numbers looking for drugs, cash, and other assets to seize. They bring in a ton of money doing this. What they do is find any reason they can to pull over people from out of state, especially rental cars or people with Arizona, California, or New Mexico tags, and especially those occupied by minorities. They pull tons of people over, run the dogs around their cars and search them. I am convinced that in many cases the dogs don't really even alert. I've seen several of the dashboard recordings of these stops that the police make. In most cases the police pull up behind the cars offset by a couple of feet, and the dogs for seem reason almost always alert when they are on the side of the car that is outside of the camera's view. Then they say they have probable cause and start tearing the car apart looking for whatever they might find.

The stops are often for silly reasons. It's usually something like improper lane change or following. These are never caught on camera because they don't turn the cameras on until they are pulling the person over to the side of the road. In so many of these cases I've handled in the past couple of years, the stop has been for following too close on a section of highway where only one lane is open due to road work. Traffic was bumper to bumper and technically everyone was following too close, yet they only pull the guy with the Arizona tags over. And our courts have said that's fine, even if the cop did it on a hunch that the guy might be carrying drugs. As long as there is any valid reason for the stop, it doesn't matter that he lets everyone else go for the same thing and it doesn't matter that the main reason he picked this one car is because he had a hunch that it might be carrying contraband.

It seems like just about every time I drive down that stretch of highway they have somebody pulled over and are going through all of their stuff. In most cases they don't find anything, but these people are held up in their journeys and treated like criminals. That's wrong, but there are places all over America where it happens all the time. And it's getting worse, and will continue to get worse as long as courts keep ignoring the intent of the 4th Amendment.