The vast majority of the police are good guys and you would have nothing to fear. A small percentage are bad guys. I would not give them permission to search. More than one bag of grass, or controlled substance has made its way into the car via a plant by the cops.
My apologies to all the straight cops but it only takes one to tarnish the rest.
And it is a huge gamble on which one you would get. Too large of a gamble.
My sister is an attorney and her advice was this — lock your car door, close it and ask the local cop to call in a state police officer to witness the search if they insist on a search.
A friend of mine in high school was kissing his girlfriend when the friendly tap on the window from a local cop occurred. Instead of telling them to move along, the cop insisted on a search of his vehicle. He closed & locked the car and asked for a state police officer to be present during the search. The cop was annoyed because his integrity was questioned, but he let him go with a "don't come back here" warning.
As a result,I'd never give permission to search even though the most dangerous/illegal thing I ever carry in my car is a jack and a cigarette lighter.
i used to say the same thing to my sons and you know what....i now am not sure what to say to them because we, in spite of being law abiding citizens, all have a bad taste in our mouth from the good cops that are overstepping their legal boundaries these days.
especially in this age where local governments are using cops to drum up cash. i have seen too many stops for nothing which then don’t take long to escalate to negative encounters.
one night four female friends and i (who were all sober) were driving in a family van and were stopped by a cop who refused to tell us why he was stoppping us. he was fishing for some reason to give us a ticket or check us out for booze. we didn’t dare press the issue too much because just a few weeks before a woman was handcuffed to a mail box in DC (of course another of the good cops). finally when we continued to ask, he said he stopped us because we “braked coming down a hill”.
there is entirely too much of this nonsense.
Cops like this: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,313743,00.html
are why I no longer trust officers of the “law”. And it took more than one such story like this to convince me that it’s not wise to take a chance with your life and freedom by blindly trusting the person that’s pulling you over.
Sure, most of the time they’re honest cops and nothing, other than maybe getting a ticket, happens. But it only takes “one time” of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and stopped by the wrong cop for you to be dead or falsely imprisoned. Some of the cops I’ve been given tickets by over the years have seemed ok, but there were others that gave me the creeps and made me feel like they’d have LOVED for me to resist or give them an excuse to do something violent.
Ha. A couple years ago I bought a used Jeep Cherokee. I was cleaned up and detailed real nice. Still I thought the $20 bill in the ashtray was a good find, folded up in a receipt for a recent lube and oil change. And about a year later I had occasion to extend the passenger side headrest and underneath was neatly tucked a small bag of bud (I gave it to someone who I knew would enjoy it, 'cause I don't). Would have been just a violation in Oregon but still the fine can be as high as $1000. So no, don't consent to searches. A few years ago I got stopped on suspicion of expired registration. During the stop the cop tried very hard to look through the vary dark tinted canopy windows to see the stuff inside, it was too obvious. I told him the windows were tinted dark for a reason and I wasn't going to permit any fishing, so stop wasting my time and either write a ticket or move along.
Oregon's laws regarding traffic stops and consent searches are very restrictive to the police. They are permitted to investigate only the PC for the violation stop and anything beyond that is strictly consensual and must be made clear when consent is asked for.