Question for LEOs, Traffic Stop

[s&wchad]

I've never been an LEO and haven't been pulled over in 20+ years. Mrs Chad and I keep registrations and proof of insurance for both of our vehicles in our wallets. Leaving them in the vehicles seems like a bad idea to me.

I try not to keep anything in the vehicles that lists my home address. I also program "home" in the navigation system as the nearest major intersection. If someone steals my truck, I don't want them to be able to drive to my house and use the garage door opener to get inside.

 

[biku324]

On traffic stops (movies TV) and probably in real life, the driver is asked for license and registration , maybe insurance.
If you are driving your own vehicle with current tags and yearly sticker, why do you need a paper copy of registration? The plate is registered to you and vehicle and your DL IDs you

Am I missing something??

It's different in every state, but NM requires your certificate of registration to be carried and exhibited to an officer on demand. Same-same driver's license and proof of insurance.

Here's the registration law:

66-3-13. Evidence of registration to be signed and exhibited on demand.

A. Every owner, upon receipt of registration evidence, shall write that owner's signature thereon in a space provided. Every such registration evidence or duplicate of registration evidence validated by the division shall be exhibited upon demand of any police officer.

B. A person charged with violating the provisions of this section shall not be convicted if the person produces, in court, evidence of a signed registration valid at the time of issuance of the citation.

History: 1953 Comp., § 64-3-13, enacted by Laws 1978, ch. 35, § 33; 2013, ch. 204, § 2.

 

[LoboGunLeather]

First few months on the job I walked a beat in the downtown area. To contact us the dispatcher would activate our tower light; there were three of different colors located to be visible most places downtown. Then we walked to a fire phone box, contact fire dispatch, request transfer to PD dispatch, exchange whatever information, then back to the sidewalks, alleys, bars and nightclubs.

Drivers without valid registration could find themselves standing on the side of the road watching their cars towed to the impound yard, to be held for proof of ownership, in addition to the summons for failure to produce registration on demand. Either way there were towing and storage fees to pay in order to reclaim the car, and the impound lot was only open from 8AM to 4PM weekdays.

 

[Rule3]

Guess I should have said in you State of residence . I guess if out of State it would be harder for the LEO to ID your your plate/registration.
With today's high tech I would think the patrol car computer can pull up all your info in seconds.

I have read that you can keep a copy on your phone, or that may just be your insurance, I keep a copy of everything in the car and in my wallet.

 

[oink]

Dispatchers are usually over worked these days with all kinds of stuff. Radio traffic is generally excessive and unnecessary running of stuff is often discouraged. If so equipped the information can be run by computer in the patrol car. But remember, we don't want people texting and driving. Do you want the cops playing on a computer while driving. As mentioned by others, sitting in a patrol car on a traffic stop with your head burried in a computer screen is stupid. Very unsafe! We used to preach always doing your ticket stuff standing at the back corner of the patrol car so you could better observe the vehicle occupant, etc. If if you wanted to you frequently don't have the time to run a plate before making a stop. Remember, two man cars are the exception. Most cops work alone. Sometimes you can feel very alone. Please carry your DL. insurance and registration and be ready to display them.

 

[steelslaver]

Here your supposed to have registration and proof of insurance in the car.

Here there are plenty of places that nobody is gonna call anything in. Lots of spots with no cell signal whatsoever.

But, having it in the car sure makes it handy for car thieves to know where to go if they also do burglaries. Thankfully around here thieves are fairly sparse and the vast majority of those who are thieves are mental midgets.

 

[LVSteve]

The 'head down at the computer' issue has been largely fixed by equipping patrol cars with number plate readers attached to the computer. The officer only has to confirm the state and that the reader is seeing it right and hit the go button.


Cars being single manned at night is an issue for individual jurisdictions and their funding. It sounds like a bad plan to me, and I've never been in LE.

 

[oink]

The plate readers are also funding issues and are actually rare. A few traffic cars will have them in some jurisdictions. Most cop cars are single man cars. Yeah it's a funding issue and funding has been reduced significantly in many leftist areas. Funding for law enforcement has almost always been tight. Single man cars will continue to be the norm.

 

[LoadedRound]

It really doesn't bother me one way or another. I keep the registration with the proof of insurance ready to go.
If an officer is asking, he likely just caught me doing something stupid. I'm going to be the picture of cooperation

 

[Doug M.]

Best answer: be low profile and don't get stopped. My main goal when driving is to be within the envelope of allowed behavior. I refer to my highway speed choice as "threshold of trooper", and use my cruise control to stay under that level. Given the number of people who pass me, I am reasonably confident that they will attract enforcement action long before I do. Our division did the court stuff on infractions for the last couple years (just gave it back to the criminal division, YAY) and the number of tickets showing speeds as far as 30 over on I 90 was ... interesting. Quite often, these drivers were passing parked troopers at such speed. Prime indication of being a poor driver.

One pet peeve is folks who cruise in the left lane; generally unlawful and quite impolite. That kind of inattentive driving makes for a good basis for a stop.

 

[Autonomous]

I am horrified today when I see my new Troopers sitting in patrol cars, totally focused on the d@&% computer screen instead of what is happening around them. That lack of awareness can get you killed.

Please forgive the thread drift but this is a huge problem in transportation too.
Aircraft, boats & ships and trains all have that problem with modern systems, especially with new crews, having the operators treating the situation like a video game. Situational awareness is lost while intuition and feel aren't developed.
I've seen it firsthand on trains, read about it in aircraft and caught myself doing it on a boat when I first got a chart plotter with RADAR. Never mind everyday drivers on their phones.

 

[Bald1]

It's different in every state, but NM requires your certificate of registration to be carried and exhibited to an officer on demand. Same-same driver's license and proof of insurance.

Here's the registration law:

66-3-13. Evidence of registration to be signed and exhibited on demand.

A. Every owner, upon receipt of registration evidence, shall write that owner's signature thereon in a space provided. Every such registration evidence or duplicate of registration evidence validated by the division shall be exhibited upon demand of any police officer.

B. A person charged with violating the provisions of this section shall not be convicted if the person produces, in court, evidence of a signed registration valid at the time of issuance of the citation.

History: 1953 Comp., § 64-3-13, enacted by Laws 1978, ch. 35, § 33; 2013, ch. 204, § 2.

Here’s the problem with NY (imagine that NY does something dumb). Before a certain year in the 70s vehicles had transferable registrations instead of titles. And if you signed this transferable registration it was to transfer ownership. Soooooooo as a teen NY wants me to drive my 68 Camaro around with the signed title in the glovebox?!?!?! If stolen the bad guy now has my car, the title and my signature saying he owns it. Not gonna happen. This is still a sore subject with hot rodders and collector car guys.

 

[LoboGunLeather]

The 'head down at the computer' issue has been largely fixed by equipping patrol cars with number plate readers attached to the computer. The officer only has to confirm the state and that the reader is seeing it right and hit the go button.


Cars being single manned at night is an issue for individual jurisdictions and their funding. It sounds like a bad plan to me, and I've never been in LE.

You may be interested to know that about half of all law enforcement agencies in the United States do not have sufficient staffing to have one officer physically on duty 24 hours per day. Many rely upon on-call personnel, technically off-duty but required to respond to emergency situations.

Even more agencies do not have their own telephone and dispatching facilities, relying on cooperative agreements with other cities, counties, or regional authorities. 9-1-1 authorities exist in many areas, but not all places.

7 days per week equals 168 hours. A 40-hour work week requires 4.2 full-time employees, plus sick leave, vacations, mandatory in-service training requirements, etc. When your call comes in after another call (or two, or three), or your complaint is of a lower priority than another active complaint, or the on-duty officer is required to appear in court, or is transporting a combative mental health case to the nearest facility (you get the idea, don't you?), you may have a longer wait for response than you are expecting, or comfortable with.

The national labor laws specifically exempt emergency services personnel (firefighters, cops, etc) from wage and hour regulations, overtime pay requirements, etc. State laws may vary. Not all departments are union shops with representation and lawyers standing by.

Up to the minute data terminals in patrol cars are wonderful, if the agency can afford them, or if they can get the grant money to install them, and then they require regular maintenance and service contracts that not every community is prepared to pay for. Dedicated license plate readers, linked to the computer system, are great to have, but most units do not have them.

Major cities with the best budgets usually measure response times to high-priority calls in the range of 20 to 45 minutes. Outlying communities may measure those response times in hours or days.

I spent a lot of my career working without back-up within an hour's response time, and frequently without reliable communications for hours at a time.

 

[Faulkner]

I spent a lot of my career working without back-up within an hour's response time, and frequently without reliable communications for hours at a time.

Good post Lobo. As I near the end of my LE career I still work with backup sometimes an hour or more away. As you noted it's mostly at night when some of the smaller towns where backup might come from send their officers home and turn off the traffic lights.

Although it wasn't that long ago when unreliable communications was a thing it's not so much in my remote and rural area. Between the UHF and VHF radio nets plus cell phone call or text it's rare that I can't get through to dispatch, and I pretty much know every communications dead spot in the county.

 

[Golddollar]

I've never been an LEO and haven't been pulled over in 20+ years. Mrs Chad and I keep registrations and proof of insurance for both of our vehicles in our wallets. Leaving them in the vehicles seems like a bad idea to me.

I try not to keep anything in the vehicles that lists my home address. I also program "home" in the navigation system as the nearest major intersection. If someone steals my truck, I don't want them to be able to drive to my house and use the garage door opener to get inside.

The town police station is three blocks from my house. I think I will change the "Home" setting to that.

 

[Buford57]

The town police station is three blocks from my house. I think I will change the "Home" setting to that.

Worked for me.

 

[Buford57]

On my 1st cop job, to run anyhing I had to call county dispatch on the radio and request my check. The dispatcher then had to sign off, change channels and then call a neighboring county that was big enough to have computer access to run stuff. Then after getting that back from the other county she would change back to our channel, sign back on and then give me my requested information. I obviously didn't run much stuff.

We had that situation plus the 2nd county had to teletype the state licensing agency, which shut down at midnight Saturday until 6 AM Monday. I hear times have changed.

 

[oink]

... 2nd county had to teletype the state...

yeah that's what I meant. Nobody had computers unless some really big agencies had ones like they used to show on the old original Hawaii 50 with the tapes and punch cards that took up whole rooms.

 

[biku324]

You may be interested to know that about half of all law enforcement agencies in the United States do not have sufficient staffing to have one officer physically on duty 24 hours per day. Many rely upon on-call personnel, technically off-duty but required to respond to emergency situations.

Bienvenidos a Nuevo Mexico!

What was described in the excellent post above is exactly, precisely still true. I retired twenty-odd years ago, and my neighbor, a 40-something senior officer in my old agency, has the same comm dead spots that existed then. Some are lessened by cell phone coverage, but radio dead spots tend to also be cell dead spots. It was possible by the '90s to remedy the problem with satellite comms, but such are prohibitively expensive. And this a 700 officer agency!

0f roughly 18,000 police agencies in the US, half have fewer than 25 officers. Don't confuse what happens in a few dozen major agencies with what the actual norm is elsewhere.

 

[S-W4EVER]

I never had a MDT as a Trooper and couldn’t believe how much easier the job was when I became a City Policeman with an MDT in the car. Computers are a crutch for the younger guys, things get really quiet when they go down for maintenance. In days past, we were required to learn the motor code and didn’t need a computer to do our jobs.