I've road tripped all over the US without ever encountering that kind of behavior. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but your characterization of expecting to be pulled over and have a dog search your car is a bit melodramatic.
I live in Florida now; sheriff’s deputies in my county are very chill. They wave and say hello, and they don’t care why there’s something weird in the back of my truck.
There was even a time when I was distracted, and drove partially through a red light (in Queens), and the car coming from the other side was a NYPD cruiser. If I hadn't braked, I would have hit them. The officers inside the NYPD cruiser glared at me (with a very angry face), and I braked, and then reversed back to behind the red light. But they went on their way (and didn't give me a ticket or anything). I'm not sure why my experience has been so different. Maybe the NYPD changed after wave of BLM/etc. protests that started in 2014?
That is to say just because it didn’t happen to you doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen - and because it happened to other people, we know it does happen in spite of it never having happened to you.
There is 100% chance I will lose a substantial amount of money due to a lockdown, there is %99+ chance I will survive the virus. Of course this risk profile isn't for everyone but that's the beauty of personal liberty: the freedom to make the choice that's right for you.
But your personal choice does determine if you put the lives of not only everyone around you but also your entire community at risk. Does that count for anything?
I live in an area that isn't Florida but does not adhere to quarantine guidelines. Personally, I don't know of anyone who has been sick. We wash our hands and take basic precautions and anecdotally that has been sufficient.
Personal disclaimer: I am anti lockdown. This is causing substantial damage to our economy and I depend on my community having the financial means to purchase my services and products.
I work in construction and the majority of the jobsites do not wear masks. We are all ok. If you are feeling sick then don't be an asshole and show up to work. Everyone I know has followed this basic guideline. Of course you will say you can have it and be asymptomatic etc and we could discuss this ad nauseum but I will just tell you I am not open to changing my mind. I have an absolutism mentality on this position. I don't think we know enough about the virus to make these types of detrimental restrictions. For example we now know putting someone on a ventilator for an extended period of time typically does more harm than good.
That's not the point of using a mask at all. It never was, to begin with.
Masks are intended to limit or eliminate the chance you infect people around you. Sure, they also help you not breed in particles, but masks are quite literally a filter you place over your mouth and nose to stop the droplets you're emitting from spreading around.
The rationale is that covid carriers can spread the disease for over a week without even suspecting they have it. They spread the disease by spraying infected droplets through their airways. Thus, the right thing to do is to be on the safe side and ensure we cannot contribute to spread the disease.
If the whole community acts responsibly and takes basic measures to stop the disease from spreading, the disease stops spreading and the epidemic is reigned in.
You wear a mask to protect the community and ensure everyone around you stays safe. You're intentionally putting everyone around you and everyone you contact with at risk if you not only refuse to take basic precautions such as wearing a mask but also engage with people who also refuse to do so.
Another friend of mine is a retired NYPD lieutenant and I forgot exactly what happened but he told me a story of someone claiming to be innocent and his response was "How do you think I became lieutenant?"
Don't fuck with the white shirts.
I've rarely been stopped and never felt like the police were trying to seize my vehicle or acting more intensely than the situation warrants.
I don't know what the difference is, but I can second GP's statement that the experience you and GGP had isn't universal.
I know it happens, and for some unlucky people it happens more than once, but I think discussions like this tend to overstate how often it occurs because of self selection bias.
> I can tell you right now, police in rural areas absolutely _are_ looking for any and every excuse in the book to pull you over, search your vehicle, and question you far more intensely than the situation warrants.
As was the root comment in this thread:
> In these towns, if you have out-of-state plates, you will regularly be pulled over for doing 5mph below the speed limit. You can expect a dog to sniff around your car if the patrol has one.
That's what I'm disputing here, not the injustice of CAF when it happens. Even people who oppose civil asset forfeiture (including me) still feel comfortable traveling throughout the nation.
I would not call that "implying the norm".
Regardless, CAF needs to be abolished and I wish the crowd that cares so much about the Constitution would care about Amendments that aren't the 2nd and 1st.
How frequent should that problem be until it's recognized as a problem?
From where I'm standing, civil asset forfeiture sounds like blatant corruption and outright stealing made good on paper.
I only take issue with the suggestion in this thread that we should be afraid to travel around the nation because of these rare events. There's far more reason to be afraid of dying in a crash.
I’m saying I’ve traveled the U.S. a /lot/ in several different capacities (from personal trips to touring with bands) and that rural areas by and large have given me more problems in terms of police than urban areas ever have.
I’m not implying that you should be afraid to travel - I’m saying quite plainly that the incentives around CAF are severely misaligned and that cops are very aware of this fact and abuse it when they can, and that takes different forms but one of those is mundane traffic stops that turn into roadside interrogations.
But then again, our cops aren't exactly despised or severely strapped for cash. They're mostly like the cop from wayne's world.
E.g., a town is off a highway that's a known part of a drug route. A consultant comes in to the police dept. and does a powerpoint showing an average annual amount of drug money they can confiscate in order to fund the police/town budget. And the consultant probably has numbers from other towns who did the same. Boom-- you've got yet another civil asset forfeiture program in yet another small town.
So you get this town's police pulling over a larger and larger set of people who fit whatever description they've taught themselves rakes in the dough. There's a big incentive to do this, and to enlarge the set of who can be pulled because-- until relatively recently-- there has been very little risk.
I'm going to rankly speculate that the value of the OP's stuff he was lugging was high enough for such officers to take the time to pull OP over. But since OP didn't fit the drug runner description and the officer couldn't find any other pretense, they let them go.
I'll also rankly speculate you've carried stuff of much less value visible to an officer who sees you drive by.
Race almost certainly plays into this as well, but I haven't read a study to know the numbers on that.
But I do have a lot of them, and no actual tickets from those areas. I have had multiple K-9 searches with a clean car, and I did regularly get pulled over for doing less than the posted speed limit.
I can't prove that civil asset forfeiture is the reason, but my vehicle would have been a juicy target because of the things attached to it.
Almost sounds like the police can pull over and search whoever they like, weird.
The course material mentioned a couple of times that, quote, "driving at an unsafe speed" is illegal. And what's unsafe takes into account the prevailing conditions (so you can be ticketed when going the speed limit if, say, it's raining), and also the fact that deltas in speed are more dangerous than absolute speed (so if the speed limit is 55, everybody else is going 60, and you're going 40, you may well get a ticket 'cause you're creating a danger.
Almost sounds like the police can pull over and search whoever they like
Yep, that's true within 100 miles of the border - an area that accounts for the vast majority of US residents. I've been stopped several times near the Mexico border for no real reason; one office asks me questions for a minute or two, just long enough for their drug-sniffing dog to make the full round of my car and come up empty.
> Yep, that's true within 100 miles of the border - an area that accounts for the vast majority of US residents.
If you're outside that 100 miles they can just make something up.
I find that very interesting.
It really depends on locale; Some states (hello states rights southern states) have a 10 - 15mph speed trap (reform the police) style law from the speed limits in 1975. Some people drive on military bases, where, if they go 1mph over, it can affect their career.
I remember once driving through West Texas on US-90 (the highway, not the interstate) in the evening on a cross-country drive. I don't think I passed more than a handful of cars, if that, but after barely missing several antelope despite driving well under the speed limit, I just called it a night and pulled into the next motel I found.
It really drove home the point that the dangers aren't only the obvious ones. So even on a straight, empty road as flat as Kansas[1] and in broad daylight I would never go so fast. Who knows what might jump out at you, from any which way.
[1] I've driven US-50 coast-to-coast. Not much of interest in Kansas other than experiencing exactly how flat it is, particularly the western portion coming down from Colorado.
If your going to speed, at least make sure your car is in good shape the best you can.
Large animals are part of the reason most people I know who can afford to do so drive large pickups and SUVs around these parts. My mother-in-law seems to have a deer run-in every other year.
Just because you think you're alone on a road doesn't mean you actually are. I'm not clutching pearls. I grew up in a rural area with relatively long (but not Texas long) distances between points of interest, and where people often flew down rural county roads. There're reasons car accidents are so frequent out in those parts. You get lulled into a sense of complacency until the tragic moment you realize your perception was wrong. Having grew up in said rural area, I'm probably less risk averse than most people. But I don't feel the need to point out the crazy stuff I've done or seen growing up to establish my credibility; some stuff is just objectively dangerous to oneself and bystanders, and driving 100mph on American public roads is one of them. And, to be clear, pointing out the danger is not the same thing as admonishing people for doing it. Pretending it's anything else but dangerous, though, just leads to people making even more dangerous decisions. The OP said the law was dumb; it's not dumb because it is dangerous. Full stop.