Cop Escalates Expired Registration Into Violent Situation (Video)

The way home from the restaurant is nothing but pitch black, open country roads. Once I reach the last intersection before the end stretch to my house, I see a squad car on the side of the road, in the dark, monitoring the stop sign. Passing him after making the turn, I made it about a mile down the road before I notice him rapidly approaching. Those bright, symmetrical, square headlights rapidly accelerating toward my car couldn’t be mistaken for anything else; I was about to get pulled over.

The red and blue piercing lights immediately illuminated my car. I traveled about a quarter mile to a safe place in the road to pull over. I put my car in park, my emergency flashers on, had my ID and insurance card ready, rolled the window down 2 inches and locked both doors. In Illinois, among other states, a driver is not legally required to roll their window down “all the way”.

Officer A. Becker (#67) of the Dekalb County Sheriff’s Office approached my car and after identifying himself, told me why I had been pulled over. Expired registration. I acknowledged what he had said, and provided my ID and insurance upon request. He informed me that I would be receiving a citation for the registration, and that he would be back momentarily with my ticket.

After about 10 minutes, he returned to my car with my citation. Up until this moment, the traffic stop had remained professional and courteous, and my window being rolled down only two inches did not seem to interfere with our conversation or him being able to relay information. He then requested that I roll it down so that he could further explain my citation. Politely, I answered that I could hear him fine, and that I would prefer not to roll it down. It was then that the demeanor of the situation shifted, and he became aggressive. I was ordered to exit the vehicle on justification that he did not feel safe reaching through my window, even though moments before he would have passed the clipboard through had I rolled it down more. I declined to exit the vehicle, and the events that followed were entirely unnecessary and irrelevant to the reasoning for the initial stop.

Pennsylvania v. Mimms, 434 U.S. 106 (1977), is a United States Supreme Court criminal law decision holding that a police officer ordering a person out of a car following a traffic stop and conducting a pat-down to check for weapons did not violate the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

In this Supreme Court ruling, a man was ordered to exit a vehicle after being stopped for an expired registration because the officer claimed he had reasonable cause to fear for his safety based on the demeanor of the situation. The basis is that the officer’s concern for safety exceeded the “inconvenience” of the driver to exit the vehicle.

Given the professional and polite demeanor of the traffic stop in this video, a “concern for safety” was not a factor until the officer demanded I exit the vehicle for purposes of simply signing a ticket, escalating the situation because his authority was questioned. His reasoning was fabricated and a clear abuse of his “authority” derivative of law.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution – “The Fourth Amendment originally enforced the notion that “each man’s home is his castle”, secure from unreasonable searches and seizures of property by the government.  It protects against arbitrary arrests, and is the basis of the law regarding search warrants, stop-and-frisk, safety inspections, wiretaps, and other forms of surveillance, as well as being central to many other criminal law topics and to privacy law.”
The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides, “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”