Minnesota Law Says Cops Can’t Ask Drivers Why They’ve Been Pulled Over, But Ensures Cops Can Totally Do That Very Thing All The Time

Cops love a pretextual stop. A perceived traffic infraction is all that’s needed to cast out a fishing net in hopes of landing something bigger than a citation for an illegal lane change.

That’s why cops have historically led most traffic stops with a leading question: do you know why I’ve pulled you over? It’s a stupid question. The cop knows why. The driver can usually only speculate. But cops hope speculation might lead to bigger and better things, ranging from admissions of other moving violations to the presence of contraband in the car.

It also allows cops to buy a little time — something they need now that the Supreme Court has said they can no longer unreasonably extend traffic stops. By asking a few questions up front, a few minutes can be added to the clock, allowing officers to bring in a drug dog or just spend more time staring down the driver, any passengers, and clocking the interior of the car.

Realizing that pretextual stops were achieving little more than thousands of rights violations every year, the California legislature forwarded a bill to the governor. With the signing of that bill, California became the first state in the nation to require cops to tell people why they’ve been pulled over (putting the pretext front and center) rather than starting every traffic stop with a game of Twenty Questions.

Minnesota has now become the second state to do this. (But not really.) While there have been questions about the state’s law enforcement and its reliance on pretextual stops (one of which led to a very high-profile killing of driver by a Minneapolis cop), the bigger issue in the state is that it’s still on the defensive, thanks to Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of an unarmed black man — a killing that sparked anti-police violence demonstrations across the country.

The state’s police reform efforts have been hit and miss. And, sadly, that is the case here. This report by Mohamed Ibrahim for MinnPost leads with the good news:

According to the new language, a peace officer making a stop for a traffic violation can no longer ask the driver to identify the reason for the stop, but must instead tell the driver a reason “unless it would be unreasonable to do so under the totality of the circumstances.” 

That seems like a positive step forward until you reach the quote at the end of the paragraph. At that point, officer discretion comes into play. And if a cop can imagine any reason under the “totality of the circumstances” to start playing guessing games rather than complying with the law, you can bet an officer will lead off with the forbidden question.

It gets worse immediately after that. Even if a cop can’t come up with a semi-plausible reason to hide the purpose of the stop from the driver, they’ll probably do it anyway because there are zero consequences for violating the new law.

An officer’s failure to do so, however, wouldn’t allow for dismissal of a charge, citation or evidence collected during the stop.

Given this, one wonders why the bill was passed, much less signed into law. The second half undoes the first half and leaves the status quo intact while accomplishing nothing more than blowing a few more tax dollars to achieve nothing at all.

And that’s why cops are going on record with statements supporting the law. The MinnPost report quotes Jeff Potts, former Bloomington PD officer and current executive director of cop union Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association. Potts pretends this is a win for the public when it’s really just a bunch of empty words masquerading as a police reform effort.

“You don’t want to start the conversation in a position where the violator has to make an admission of guilt or something like that, so it’s just a more positive way to have the interaction with the driver of the vehicle.”

Cool cool cool. Except that if an officer does want to “start the conversation” by trying to force an “admission of guilt” from a driver, they absolutely can without having to worry about charges being dropped or any evidence obtained from a warrantless search deriving from a violation of the spirit of the law (and even the letter of the law!) being tossed by a court.

The article says it’s comparable to the law passed in California. But California’s law didn’t allow cops to get away with violating the law by removing any consequence for doing so. It provided officers an option to withhold this information, which will certainly be abused. But it didn’t make it clear that officers who disobeyed the law would get away with it literally every time they chose to violate it.

I can’t even say this is better than doing nothing. Doing nothing would have cost less and achieved the same level of inertia. This is lawmakers pretending to care but ultimately showing they’re beholden to police union lobbyists and the very American outlook that says it’s always better to be tough on crime than protective of constituents’ rights.