Minor detours to the traffic stop, but all related to it, didn’t unreasonably extend the stop. The dog was quickly called for. United States v. Alba, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 189133 (D. Utah Aug. 21, 2026). How the court handled the detours is instructive:
The traffic-based mission of the stop extends to “officer actions that are reasonably related in scope to the mission of the stop.” This includes activities closely related to traffic enforcement, roadway safety, and officer safety, such as verifying a driver’s license and registration, checking for warrants, issuing citations, or confirming a vehicle’s rental agreement. But investigating other crimes, including conducting a K-9 sniff, deviates from the traffic-based mission.
Rodriguez also requires the detour prolong—that is, add time to—the traffic stop.This is a fact-intensive question. The detour may not extend beyond “the time needed to handle the matter for which the stop was made.” But “the Fourth Amendment does not require officers to use the least intrusive or most efficient means conceivable to effectuate a traffic stop.” Instead, the court must consider whether the officer was diligent in pursuing routine traffic tasks incident to the stop. Duration may be evidence of diligence or lack thereof.
If the court finds a detour that prolongs the stop, this is the “Rodriguez moment.” At that moment, reasonable suspicion becomes necessary. “Even de minimus delays caused by unrelated inquiries violate the Fourth Amendment in the absence of reasonable suspicion.”
. . .
Ranger McCann may contemporaneously engage in tasks unrelated to the traffic-based mission so long as he diligently pursues the stop’s mission, such that the other tasks do not prolong the stop. That is the case here. Each of the claimed detours occurred while Ranger McCann pursued the reckless driving investigation and processing: while asking Alba for her identification, he sees the vape, asks questions about it, and inspects it. While logging into his computer and speaking to dispatch, Ranger McCann makes the second request for a K-9 unit. Specifically, Ranger McCann asked for a K-9 to come “while I’m doing this,” referring to writing up the citation, looking up Alba’s driver’s license and license plate information, and getting the citation form ready. And while processing Alba’s information, he briefly summarizes the encounter with Alba to Trooper Roundy and Sergeant Blankenagle as they arrive.
Ranger McCann’s diligence is further underscored by the brevity of each alleged detour: the “roadside lecture” lasted 21 seconds, the vape inspection lasted 15 seconds, the second request for a K-9 took 5 seconds, the conversation with Trooper Roundy took approximately 23 seconds, and the conversation with Seargeant Blankenagle took approximately 40 seconds. The length of each detour does not render it constitutional, since even de minimus delays violate Rodriguez. But the duration is evidence of Ranger McCann’s diligence in processing the traffic stop. The evidence shows these detours did not delay or interrupt the pursuit of that mission. A reckless driving investigation is more intensive than a speeding citation, and had the K-9 not been present, Ranger McCann would still have been working on the reckless investigation when Louie indicated. Based on this record, the court concludes no detour prolonged the stop under Cates.
"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.
