Car theft is an offense that carries with it enough risk of use of weapons to justify a frisk. Independently, there were facts justifying a frisk on reasonable suspicion. United States v. Bullock, 379 U.S. App. D.C. 114, 510 F.3d 342 (2007):
In this case, once Bullock could not produce the registration information and could not identify the owner of the car, Officer Jackson possessed reasonable suspicion that Bullock had stolen the car. Like burglary, car theft is a crime that often involves the use of weapons and other instruments of assault that could jeopardize police officer safety, and thus justifies a protective frisk under Terry to ensure officer safety. As the Eighth Circuit has held, “when officers encounter suspected car thieves, they also may reasonably suspect that such individuals might possess weapons.” United States v. Hanlon, 401 F.3d 926, 929 (8th Cir. 2005) (internal quotation marks omitted); see also United States v. Williams, 7 F. App’x 876, 885 (10th Cir. 2001) (permissible to frisk driver prior to consensual search of potentially stolen van); United States v. Bradley, 1990 WL 124205, at *2 (6th Cir. 1990) (officers were “justified in frisking both the driver and passenger of the car that they believed to have been recently stolen” because it was reasonable to believe that a person “suspected of having recently been involved in a car theft[] might have been armed and dangerous”).
. . .
Statistics show that traffic stops continue to be extraordinarily dangerous to the police officers who risk their lives to protect the public. Every year in traffic stops and pursuits in the United States, about 6,000 police officers are assaulted-and about 10 officers are killed. U.S. DEP’T OF JUSTICE, FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, UNIFORM CRIME REPORTS: LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS KILLED AND ASSAULTED (2006), at http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/killed/2006/index.html. By ordering Bullock out of the car and frisking him for purposes of officer safety, Officer Jackson did not take “any unreasonable steps in attempting to ensure that he would not become one of these statistics.” Holmes, 385 F.3d at 791.
Qualified immunity was improperly granted to an officer for a three hour detention of a Haitian-American who was driving a cargo van with ten cardboard barrels inside on the Taconic State Parkway in Westchester County. The officer suspected an IED, but neither a bombsniffing or a drug dog alerted. The officer had her unhandcuffed and required her to come to the stationhouse to clear it up. After a few telephone calls, the plaintiff’s story checked out that she was merely driving the barrels to a shipping company that contained things the Haitian community in Westchester County was shipping home, and she was released. Gilles v. Repicky, 511 F.3d 239 (2d Cir. 2007).*
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"If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. It isn't, and they don't." —Me
"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well." –Josh Billings (pseudonym of Henry Wheeler Shaw), Josh Billings on Ice, and Other Things (1868) (erroneously attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson, among others)
“I am still learning.” —Domenico Giuntalodi (but misattributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti (common phrase throughout 1500's)).
"Love work; hate mastery over others; and avoid intimacy with the government."
—Shemaya, in the Thalmud
"It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."
—Charles Dickens, “The Old Curiosity Shop ... With a Frontispiece. From a Painting by Geo. Cattermole, Etc.” 255 (1848)
"A system of law that not only makes certain conduct criminal, but also lays down rules for the conduct of the authorities, often becomes complex in its application to individual cases, and will from time to time produce imperfect results, especially if one's attention is confined to the particular case at bar. Some criminals do go free because of the necessity of keeping government and its servants in their place. That is one of the costs of having and enforcing a Bill of Rights. This country is built on the assumption that the cost is worth paying, and that in the long run we are all both freer and safer if the Constitution is strictly enforced." —Williams v. Nix, 700 F. 2d 1164, 1173 (8th Cir. 1983) (Richard Sheppard Arnold, J.), rev'd Nix v. Williams, 467 US. 431 (1984).
"The criminal goes free, if he must, but it is the law that sets him free. Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence." —Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 659 (1961).
"Any costs the exclusionary rule are costs imposed directly by the Fourth Amendment."
—Yale Kamisar, 86 Mich.L.Rev. 1, 36 n. 151 (1987).
"There have been powerful hydraulic pressures throughout our history that bear heavily on the Court to water down constitutional guarantees and give the police the upper hand. That hydraulic pressure has probably never been greater than it is today." — Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 39 (1968) (Douglas, J., dissenting).
"The great end, for which men entered into society, was to secure their property." —Entick v. Carrington, 19 How.St.Tr. 1029, 1066, 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (C.P. 1765)
"It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people. And so, while we are concerned here with a shabby defrauder, we must deal with his case in the context of what are really the great themes expressed by the Fourth Amendment." —United States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, 69 (1950) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting)
"The course of true law pertaining to searches and seizures, as enunciated here, has not–to put it mildly–run smooth." —Chapman v. United States, 365 U.S. 610, 618 (1961) (Frankfurter, J., concurring).
"A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the bottom of a turntable." —Arizona v. Hicks, 480 U.S. 321, 325 (1987)
"For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. ... But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected." —Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351 (1967)
“Experience should teach us to be most on guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” —United States v. Olmstead, 277 U.S. 438, 479 (1925) (Brandeis, J., dissenting)
“Liberty—the freedom from unwarranted intrusion by government—is as easily lost through insistent nibbles by government officials who seek to do their jobs too well as by those whose purpose it is to oppress; the piranha can be as deadly as the shark.” —United States v. $124,570, 873 F.2d 1240, 1246 (9th Cir. 1989)
"You can't always get what you want / But if you try sometimes / You just might find / You get what you need." —Mick Jagger & Keith Richards, Let it Bleed (album, 1969)
"In Germany, they first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came for me–and by that time there was nobody left to speak up."
—Martin Niemöller (1945) [he served seven years in a concentration camp]
“Children grow up thinking the adult world is ordered, rational, fit for purpose. It’s crap. Becoming a man is realising that it’s all rotten. Realising how to celebrate that rottenness, that’s freedom.” – John le Carré, The Night Manager (1993), line by Richard Roper
"The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers, is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime." —Johnson v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 13-14 (1948)
The book was dedicated in the first (1982) and sixth (2025) editions to Justin William Hall (1975-2025). He was three when this project started in 1978.
