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Originally posted by 1kiki:
Can anyone make sense of this?

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“I decided to sell a camper on Craig's List,” Esbensen explained in an interview several weeks ago. “After I got an offer, I put a dealer plate on the rear of the camper and drove it from Vale to the clinic in Ontario, where I cleaned it up and got it ready to deliver to the buyer in Boise.”

By that time, the 45th Parallel was under relentless surveillance by the HDDTF, which was constantly intercepting Idaho-bound traffic from the clinic. When Esbensen left the parking lot, the officers put their well-rehearsed plan into action.

“A few blocks away from my clinic, I was stopped by an Oregon State Trooper,” Esbensen continued. “He told me that a taillight wasn't working, so I fixed it there by the side of the road. While I was working, this guy goes, `It kind of smells like pot.' I called his bluff, telling him he was lying. He didn't know what to say, so he let me go.”

Esbensen made it to the I-84 exit, and was just barely across the state line when he was stopped by two Payette County Sheriff's deputies for a supposed “license plate violation” for displaying a single dealer's plate, as state law requires.

“Sure enough, as soon as they got near the vehicle, one of them said, `Hey, it kind of smells like pot,'” Esbensen recounted, his voice laden with weary disgust, Esbensen once again told the officers they were lying.

“You must think I'm really stupid,” he told the deputies. “Why would I be bringing pot into Idaho?”

The Payette County deputies let Esbensen go, but trailed him all the way to the county line – where they handed him off to an even larger contingent of costumed pests.

The moment he reached Canyon County “I was pulled over again – and this time there were five state police cars, in addition to the DEA, sheriff's deputies, and a K9 officer with a police car. The moment they stopped me, one of the officers shouted, `Get out of the car – it smells like pot!' I told him he was lying, and they sat me down in the back of a cop car while they ran the drug dog all around the camper.”

In his affidavit, ISP Trooper Christopher Cottrell claimed that when Esbensen rolled down his window, “I could immediately smell the strong odor of marijuana coming from the vehicle.” That was a lie, of course: The drug-sniffing dog – which was trained not only to detect marijuana, but to follow prompts – absolutely failed to “alert” to the vehicle, much to the frustration of the road pirates who anticipated a headline-snagging bust and a lucrative forfeiture haul.

“They couldn't take it,” Esbensen recalled with a chuckle. “They didn't have any probable cause, and I had explicitly refused to consent to a search, but they went into the trailer anyway and searched it for 35 minutes. They found nothing but the cleanest trailer they had ever seen. And they also went into my personal effects – which they had no legal right to do – and they eventually 'found' a single joint.”

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
So, I got pulled over - taillight - and let go.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
That makes me wonder - what is the upside and downside calculation they run as they decide.

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white and helpless little old lady looking

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
Actually was out - but got let go without even a fix-it ticket.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
So it makes me wonder - what has changed? Maybe the guy was just having a really bad day. Or maybe there's something more systemic going on.

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Originally posted by FREMDFIRMA:

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
So it makes me wonder - what has changed? Maybe the guy was just having a really bad day. Or maybe there's something more systemic going on.

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Well, when you make a police department dependent on such legalized theft for its budget, naturally such corruption sets in.
Run the numbers on Asset Forfeiture - you'll be appalled, especially when you look at what's being seized and from who.

-Frem

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From 2008-2011 Allegheny, PA, filed only 200 petitions for civil forfeiture, in 2011 alone, Philadelphia filed 6,560 petitions.

“The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office has turned this tool in to a veritable machine, devouring real and personal property from thousands of residents, many of whom are innocent, and converting that property in to a $5.8 million average annual stream of revenue,” Darpana Sheth, a lawyer with the Virginia-based Institute for Justice, a nonprofit public-interest law firm told CNN.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
OK.

I still wonder though.

This isn't my first taillight out. Yanno, you just never check them. Then after you have one go out you might check them intermittently for a year, maybe even two. But caution falls off and checking them falls by the wayside and ...

Police I suspect drive their owns cars on their days off. And who knows what can go wrong or unattended - a low tire, open gas filler cover, taillight out. Stuff happens. I bet it even happens to them. So, if >> I << were a cop, and I saw someone driving with a taillight out, I think, in the interests of public safety, I'd pull them over and ask - did you know your taillight was out? And yeah, people might drive off and just not get to that nagging item for a while ... which is why one writes the fix-it ticket. To ensure people are diligent. So that's what I'd do. And in fact, that's what happened with the two fix-it tickets I've gotten so far. A problem was helpfully pointed out and I was given a fix-it ticket to keep me timely.

I don't think the first thing I'd ask is 'why did you pull into the parking lot ... etc'.

If I were black, and young, and male, I'd probably expect that kind of treatment, deserved or not. But I'm so white I just about glow in the dark, and I've got that thick bifocals little old lady look about me, and that kind of treatment is highly unusual in my experience. So it makes me wonder - what has changed? Maybe the guy was just having a really bad day. Or maybe there's something more systemic going on.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
OH, btw, that was an interesting reply. It seems very to the point. I'll remember now, if I get pulled over I'll make a point of getting to private property.

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As business boomed, David bought a yacht and a condo in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and invited associates down for fishing trips, interviews and documents show. Starting in 2010, the firm began spending tens of thousands each quarter on the lobbying firm Brandon Associates to stoke interest in interdiction training in Washington — almost $200,000 in all through last year. Brandon Associates has arranged meetings with senior officials at DHS, documents show.

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Police often rely on drug-sniffing dogs to justify warrantless searches when a driver refuses to give consent. In 48 cases examined by The Post, dogs alerted to the presence of drugs but the officers found only money.

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But the legal justification is only part of the practice. As private consultants sought to expand the practice, they turned to surprisingly familiar methods, including an encrypted chat room where officers could brag about their latest hauls, share tactics, and spread private information about juicy targets passing through other jurisdictions. Known as the Black Asphalt Electronic Networking and Notification System, the chat room has over 25,000 members spread across the country, most of whom are law enforcement officers. Until recently, it was hosted at a DEA intelligence center, but has never received any official government oversight.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
Your reply. I mentioned it to people at work, and though they live in different cities and different counties in southern California, they had second hand knowledge (it happened to a friend or relative) of similar occurrences. In one case where the person stopped on the street and the police claimed to have enough suspicion, they towed the car from the street to an impound lot. The justification is that a vehicle left on the roadway is a hazard.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
Your reply. I mentioned it to people at work, and though they live in different cities and different counties in southern California, they had second hand knowledge (it happened to a friend or relative) of similar occurrences. In one case where the person stopped on the street and the police claimed to have enough suspicion, they towed the car from the street to an impound lot. The justification is that a vehicle left on the roadway is a hazard.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
So, I got pulled over - taillight - and let go. Thank god I'm white and helpless little old lady looking, otherwise I might have ended up tasered or dead.

But anyway, my question is this: I was 'lit up' a maybe 150' short of a busy local intersection with no shoulder - so I put on my blinker, slowed down and pulled into a parking lot in front of the intersection and parked. And what the cop said to me made no sense - he asked why I didn't pull over right away but instead pulled into a lot. He said - as best I can remember, something like - did you pull into parking lot rather than pull over right away because you didn't want me to take your car away from you?

Can anyone make sense of this?

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Originally posted by SHINYGOODGUY:
I actually like Frem's response because it seems to make sense. But I think you did the right thing because of what I heard happened to someone in my little town.

Out in Long Island a woman, driving alone, was pulled over by an unmarked car flashing his "lights" (the cherry stem on top), anyways, she pulled over and he proceeds to rape the young woman. He wore the uniform of the Nassau Police and stopped her in the appropriate county, but he was a fake cop.

It was in the news a few years back, and they warned people that if you must pull over in a deserted area look for the most public place - such as a parking lot or gas station and pull over.


SGG

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
So, I got pulled over - taillight - and let go. Thank god I'm white and helpless little old lady looking, otherwise I might have ended up tasered or dead.

But anyway, my question is this: I was 'lit up' a maybe 150' short of a busy local intersection with no shoulder - so I put on my blinker, slowed down and pulled into a parking lot in front of the intersection and parked. And what the cop said to me made no sense - he asked why I didn't pull over right away but instead pulled into a lot. He said - as best I can remember, something like - did you pull into parking lot rather than pull over right away because you didn't want me to take your car away from you?

Can anyone make sense of this?

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This is only one of several recent cases of sexual violence where a police officer has been accused or convicted of abusing his power and authority to abuse women while on the job. In January 2012, a Milwaukee jury convicted a policeman of violating the civil rights of a woman by raping her. In November 2013, a Texas police officer was accused of raping a 19-year-old woman. And earlier this month a sheriff’s deputy in Oklahoma was arrested on suspected rape charges at a nursing home.
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Statistics concerning sexual crimes by police against women are hard to come by, but the recent surge in incidents has left many questioning whether police departments are sending a strong enough signal over "improper" behavior while on duty.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
Oh, just FWIW

I've been seeing a lot of patrol cars parked off of intersections and a lot of streetside stops lately - one every few days as opposed to one or two a year. I think the police are trying to fill the coffers.

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But let's travel back further to set this up. Twenty-one-year-old Gregory Zullo was supposedly pulled over for having his license plate registration sticker (incidentally) covered by a small amount of snow.

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The lawsuit notes that the officer who stated this was the reason he initiated the event spent no further time on that subject. He didn't bother to brush the snow away from the registration sticker or have Zullo do it, despite the fact that both spent over 30 minutes no more than a few inches away from the offending plate.

Officer Hatch spent most of his time trying to talk Zullo into allowing him to search the vehicle without a warrant. Hatch seemed to be convinced that Zullo was involved with the heroin traffickers he was searching for. Hatch tried everything, including lying.

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When Mr. Zullo asked the defendant’s employee why he had to pay for the tow, the defendant’s employee told him that the tow cost was Mr. Zullo’s fault for exercising his rights.

There's the now-familiar lesson: exercise your rights and cops will make you pay -- one way or another -- for making their jobs difficult. This was plainly stated by an LAPD member shortly after the situation in Ferguson blew up: be anything but compliant and you'll be hurting. If you have problems with us steamrolling your rights, sue us. That attitude brings us to this. Another lawsuit filed against a law enforcement agency simply because a police officer couldn't handle being told, "No."

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