The threat being that you'll get detained and held.
I think that is always the implied threat, that it is just easier to let someone of authority overstep their bounds so as to avoid personal inconvenience and discomfort as opposed to taking a stand and forcing the legality of the issue.
Then if you are illegally detained, that's ANOTHER issue you are welcome to pursue if you enjoy court and lawyers, but we typically don't. The (expected?) result of that is one side keeps pushing harder and harder until we eventually start pushing back.
These seem like standard social mechanics much like what corporations tend to do left unwatched or govt laws. They keep tightening or growing their area of influence until someone or something pushes back.
Our society is just a giant physics simulation of forces interacting on each other, like little (or big) spheres of gravity.
I'd love to see a visualization of the social world around us, would be interesting... you could see the formation of under ground movements becoming more mainstream as those individual forces combined into bigger forces temporarily to combat larger forces, then once the equilibrium was rebalanced, the larger force would disband and go back to micro-influencing the environment around it.
wow... I got derailed there :)
The police cannot search the trunk of your car incident to an arrest.
The police can open and inventory the contents of your trunk if your vehicle is impounded.
The police can search the passenger compartment of your car if you are arrested.
You can be arrested and not have your vehicle impounded if, after arresting you and satisfying their entitlement to search the passenger compartment of your car, you have a companion who can legally drive the car away. In this case, the guy's companion was intoxicated. The police can consent to leave your car somewhere safe without impounding it, but for all intents and purposes they have the option of impounding it if it can't be removed lawfully on the spot.
If your car is impounded and its contents inventoried, anything that can reasonably be inspected as part of an inventory is admissible as evidence.
This opinion held that inventory searches did not entitle the police to "inventory" the "contents" of a phone.
But that's beside the point here, because the search that busted open the phone wasn't an inventory search; it was a search for preservation of evidence incident to arrest.
> I believe the same rules for saying "Go ahead and search
> my trunk, but I don't have a key" applies