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| I-40 Bridge coming into Memphis at 3:30 am (CST) |
I got to Hurricane Mills, Tenn at about 7:00 am and had a wonderful breakfast at Loretta Lynn's Kitchen.
The rest of the morning and into the early afternoon was wonderful. Great day that could only be better if I was on my Harley. But then....
A North Carolina Highway Patrol car slowly passes me, backs out of it and falls in to my left side as he travels just behind me. Blue lights start flashing. I'm driving with the cruise control set at 63 in a 70 zone, in my lane not weaving and clearly wearing my seat belt. Nothing is wrong with my truck and I'm not doing anything wrong. Oh wait, yes I am, I'm driving a truck. Just being behind the wheel makes me a suspect. What crime? It doesn't matter. I see an exit ramp about 1/2 mile from where I am so I let off the cruise and turn on the emergency flashers so he knows I am pulling over as soon as I get to a safe location.
It's a young trooper who tells me to open my passenger door. He steps on the running board and looks around inside the truck. He's very nice. Very professional. "I need the registration on the truck and trailer, your driver's license, medical card, and log book. I stopped you to do an inspection." I asked what prompted him to stop me and was told, "Nothing, I just thought I'd do a random inspection." Can you imagine the uproar if this were happening to people in cars? No probable cause. Not even reasonable suspicion you're doing anything wrong or in violation of any laws. Just, "I thought I'd do a random inspection."
I came away from the stop with perfect inspection but terrible disposition. What a way to screw up the perfect day. Even though my truck is, like me, getting older with a lot of miles I try to keep it in top notch condition. It is serviced and a complete preventative maintenance is done between 15 and 18 thousand miles. My son owns a diesel repair shop, ServiceFleet, in Augusta, Ga and him and his mechanics do all my routine maintenance work. They know that if I don't pass an inspection because of something they missed it will be hell to pay.
I do it by the book. I run completely legal and compliant. My log books are electronic and help keep me 100% legal. I run at or below the speed limits. This not only helps from a safety standpoint but the reduced speeds, especially on the interstates, reduces my fuel costs and puts money in my pocket. Just one nickel per mile is $125.00 per week based on an average of 2500 miles a week. That's $6500 per year just by keeping my speed lower and not idling the truck. Safety pays.
I understand safety from all my years as a law enforcement officer. I know not all trucks are not well maintained and not everybody is going to run by the book. I am as concerned as the next person by this. It's my life and that of my family who must share the roads with these people so don't get me wrong, I do get it!
My complaint is not about trucks being inspected. You will never hear me complain (loudly anyway) about a routine inspection at a scale house or other location set up specifically for checking all trucks. My complaint is a Fourth Amendment issue. Why do I lose my rights against unreasonable search and seizure just because I happen to be sitting behind the wheel of a tractor-trailer?
Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968), was decided by the United States Supreme Court 45 years ago and was a landmark decision which held that the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures are not violated when a police officer stops a suspect on the street and frisks him or her without probable cause to arrest, if the police officer has reasonable suspicion that the person has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a crime and has a reasonable belief that the person "may be armed and dangerous."
The Terry Court recognized that ''not all personal intercourse between policemen and citizens involves 'seizures' of persons,'' and suggested that ''[o]nly when the officer, by means of physical force or show of authority, has in some way restrained the liberty of a citizen may we conclude that a 'seizure' has occurred.'' Years later Justice Stewart proposed a similar standard, that a person has been seized ''only if, in view of all of the circumstances surrounding the incident, a reasonable person would have believed that he was not free to leave.''
United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, arguably one of the most liberal justices, more recently wrote the opinion for the unanimous court in the case of Arizona v. Johnson 555 U.S. 323 (2009) which in part read: "During a traffic stop... passengers are seized under the Fourth Amendment once the vehicle they're in, when stopped by the police comes to a complete stop on the side of the road..."
I put these references in to show that we are not afforded the same rights under the Bill of Rights as every other citizen, including criminals.
Look at the references. Under Terry a police officer must at least have reasonable suspicion that the person has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a crime...to be stopped in the first place. As I was driving along I fell into none of the categories and the officer had no reason to think any of these had, were, or were going to be done.
Once I was stopped "by show of authority" I was not allowed to leave. Can you imagine how far under the jail I would have been tossed if I had told him I didn't have time for the inspection and needed to continue on. This constituted a seizure under the strictest meaning of the word since I was in no way "free to leave."
Even Justice Ginsburg agreed that once a vehicle is stopped on the side of the road, "passengers are seized."
Like I said I understand the need for safety on our highways. A truck in the wrong hands is like a firearm in the wrong hands and will eventually kill. But will stepping on the Bill of Rights help anyone or is it like the President with his gun control agenda? All this is doing is creating a nation of criminals. Even if we are doing it the best and safest way possible we are still treated like criminals. We are "profiled" just for driving a truck.
How many other professions have entire law enforcement agencies, federal, state and local, dedicated to nothing but policing their profession? I can't off hand think of any. The Federal government has the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) that does nothing but regulate trucks. Each state has it's own truck enforcement division, whether it be called Transport Police, Dept of Transportation, Public Utilities or many other names they are all the same. Even local law enforcement have jumped on the band wagon in recent years assigning officers to nothing but truck enforcement. We have to obey all motor vehicle laws that the normal citizen does but, we have Federal, local, and state laws on top of those. I hate to say it because I heard it so many times over the years, "The city must be short on funds this month so you're writing more tickets," but a lot of this is a revenue grab.
Now we also have the FMCSA putting out new regulations or changing regulations almost daily and we are supposed to keep up with them.
Under it's newest rule, CSA (Compliance Safety Accountability) we are charged with things we have absolutely no control over. CSA was implemented over the weekend of December 2011 and is supposed to be a Safety Management System. CSA is currently being challenged in court but is still in use as the lawsuit proceeds.
CSA is flawed on many fronts but the most outrageous is in its Evaluation. "Evaluate safety performance of carriers and drivers and identify behavior patterns that may result in unsafe operations."
Read that again "....that may result in unsafe operations." This isn't saying that I have operated unsafely, only that I may, sometime in the future, operate unsafely due to their less that well thought out criteria. If I had a clearance light burn out during my trip when I had gotten stopped for the "inspection" I would have gotten points accessed on a scale of 1 to 100 with 100 being the worse. They think because this light burned out somewhere along my route I should have caught it and therefore I'm a danger on the highway.
I don't even have to do anything wrong. I am assigned points for anything that I'm involved with whether I'm at fault or not. Even if I am given a warning ticket it will be placed on my CSA record and held against me without due process of law under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. You can't go to court and fight a warning ticket so you have no recourse and you still get the points accessed.
One of the best examples of what can happen was stated by the Vice President of Safety for Groendyke Transport, Steve Niswander, during an inverview. "A driver can have a bad score, yet be a great driver. If, for example, a car driven by a drunk driver crosses the median and hits the truck head-on causing the death of both the driver and their passenger, you have an alcohol-involved accident with two fatalities. That will go on the driver's CSA record and it will blow their score clean out of the water through no fault of their own."
Did you read that? Scary huh? Let's try that on a passenger car. After Church you took the family to Grandma's house for Sunday fried chicken. The strongest thing you've had to drink is some of your Mom's great sweet iced tea. Now you, your wife and your two children leave and head on home. As you're driving along through town a drunk driver running 70 mph runs a stop sign hitting your car and killing everyone in the car but you. Of course the drunk driver walks away with minor injuries. You have just been involved in an alcohol-related accident with three fatalities. You've just lost your entire family and now you will also lose your job, and home because of something you had nothing to do with other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time and the points are accessed against you just for being involved. Can't happen. It could if you were behind the wheel of a truck.
I heard a story on the radio awhile back about a woman driver who had over a million miles of safe driving. No accidents, no tickets. She was stopped in traffic due to construction and even turned on her emergency flashers to warn other motorists. Someone texting and driving and not paying attention hit her truck in the rear killing themselves. Over ten years of safe driving didn't count. She was fired and can't get another job because of this incident on her record although she did everything right.
I could go on and on but I won't. I'll leave it here.
I'm not a lawyer but I do have a deep and passionate love of the law. This is my opinion based on research I've done. I'm a retired cop who's just trying to provide for my family now by driving and owning a truck. I'm not a criminal so please quit treating me like one.
PS: Thanks to a great organization like OOIDA for standing up for the little guy who can't to do it alone.
