Each step along the way, not just the officer but his manager that called me.
The internal affairs department. Something's going on here.
They all trashed everything said everything was justified.
I hadn't done anything wrong.
This police officer in San Antonio, Texas stopped Alex Schott while he was
driving home from a work trip and ended up ransacking his car to look for drugs.
My name is Alex Schott.
I live in Houston, Texas with my wife and two young sons.
Police are supposed to keep us safe, but they should also be held
accountable when they violate our rights.
Let's roll the tape and see whether this officer complied
with the Fourth Amendment.
We'll use a reasonable suspicion meter to help us out. More on that later.
Police can't just stop and detain you to fish around for evidence that
you might be doing something wrong.
The Fourth Amendment requires that they have reasonable suspicion, objective
evidence that you've committed a crime.
Otherwise they have to let you go.
the officer said the only reason he stopped Alek was because he was
drifting over the fog line, but this is a video from Alek's personal
dash cam before he was stopped.
I don't see any drifting there.
Do you?
Because we're still in fishing expedition territory, the stop and everything
after it violates the Fourth Amendment.
When I was pulled over and asked to get out of the car, I was immediately confused
because it was not a standard practice from what I've normally experienced with
the license and registration process.
Um, I was really astounded and very uneasy.
At this point, the officer orders Alek into his patrol car
so that he can issue a warning.
But if lane drifting was the only reason for the stop, the officer was
required to deal with that violation promptly, and then let Alek go.
The officer's bodycam shows that he ran Alek's license plate before
pulling him over, and the incident report shows that the officer ran a
background check on Alek less than a minute after they entered the patrol car.
Alek has never been in trouble with the law, so the checks
would've come back clean.
At this point
the officer was constitutionally required to issue a warning and let Alek go.
But he didn't.
The officer interrogated him for over 10 minutes about the purpose of his trip
and whether there were illegal drugs or large amounts of cash in his car.
Alek calmly and truthfully explains that he's driving home from a work trip
and there's nothing illegal in his car.
In other words, he acts exactly the way you'd expect any normal
law abiding citizen to act.
there and tell him about it.
We're now over 10 minutes into the stop and our meter is still frozen
in fishing expedition territory.
We're about to learn what's really going on.
Here the officer admits that the stop was never really about traffic.
It was about finding big sh*t. That's a problem.
When police decide in advance that you must be some kind of criminal, whether
a drug dealer or anything else, the result is a conspiratorial mindset under
which police can spin anything you do as suspicious. Acting nervous, suspicious.
Acting, too calm, also suspicious. Direct eye contact, no eye contact, talking too
much, not talking enough, all suspicious.
There really are no limits
to what police will argue in an effort to get around the Constitution. Would
When he asked to search my car, I told him no.
I knew I'd done nothing wrong and I shouldn't have to explain why I
shouldn't be treated like a criminal.
Alek refuses consent to search his car, not because he's hiding
anything, but because these sorts of searches can be extremely intrusive.
And even damage your property.
We're now far beyond the bounds of a illegal traffic stop, but
the officer claims to have seen some things that make him want to
keep going, so he doubles down.
He calls a drug dog to the scene to see if that will give him
an excuse to search Alek's car.
The drug dog finally arrives and the officer claims he gives a positive alert.
That means the K-9 officer thinks the dog can smell drugs in the car.
If the stop had been legitimate up to this point, then the alert might have
given the officerss probable cause to search Alex's car, but the drug dog never
should have been called in the first place because again, there was no basis for the
stop or for suspecting Alek of a crime.
So the positive alert couldn't have cured the constitutional problems.
It could only make them worse by extending an already illegitimate stop.
As I was watching them from the back of the squad car I felt violated.
Opening up the glove box, taking out my tools and my work equipment.
All of my personal property was being searched through. For the next 25 minutes,
the officers ransack Alek's car, opening every compartment and tossing every bag.
They find work gear, they find car seats.
They find Chipotle and M&M wrappers, the sort of thing that any
American might have in their car.
The one thing they don't find is any drugs or any other evidence of crime.
Well, over an hour after Alek was pulled over for a made up traffic violation,
the officer finally stopped searching his car and says he's free to leave.
What's notable here is the officer's admission that he searches cars like this
all the time, but rarely finds anything.
That's outrageous, but hardly surprising when police target innocent
people without any reason to believe they've done something wrong and gin
up reasons to ransack their cars.
The only ones violating the law are the officers themselves.
I did everything right and the police still treated me like a criminal.
This case is about providing accountability back to the Sheriff's
Department, not just for the stop, but the whole process Afterwards,
for months, even Internal Affairs and the management who contacted me said
everything was justified and that they had the right to search my vehicle.
When IJ called me back and said they were moving forward with
my case, it finally felt like my rights mattered with IJs help.
Alek is filing a lawsuit to hold the officer accountable for violating his
rights because if we the people have to follow the law, our government
must follow the Constitution.