Criminal Law Blog
October 03, 2005
The Price Of Freedom Is Vigilance, Both Abroad And At Home.
The old law was: that to arrest you for violating the “rules of the road,” (disobeying stop signs, etc.) police officers had to be in the city that commissioned them as police officers.
So if you were speeding along side a city police car, but outside the city, the cop couldn’t arrest you.
Under the new law (House Bill 915), the cop can arrest you, if he’s in the same county as the city that commissioned him.
Not a big deal? Oh, yes it is.
Why?
Police officers have their preferences as to which county they would like to see prosecute suspects.
For example, City of Austin police officers strongly prefer that they catch suspects in Williamson County, not Travis County, because Williamson County is supposedly “tougher” on crime. The City of Austin is in both Travis and Williamson Counties.
Now that APD officers can pull someone over for a traffic offense even outside their own city, they’ll just wait until they get into Williamson County.
Once they arrest the driver, they have the right to perform an “inventory” search on his car. An inventory search is to make a list of what was in the car when it was impounded. That way, the driver can’t claim that he had a bag of diamonds in the trunk that went missing. More often, the inventory search will turn up something illegal in the car.
The bottom line is that adding the jurisdiction to cops outside their cities sounds small, but is really big. There will be more traffic arrests, and more searches going on. All thanks to this “little” change in the law.
If you are really interested, you can read House Bill 915 for yourself. The link below will help you search for it. Just click on the link and type “HB915” in and hit enter.
http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/tlo/legislation/bill_status.htm
Be sure the session shown is the 79th Regular Session, not some other Session of the 79th Legislature.
It isn’t only the big changes in the law that the citizenry needs to watch. We need to carefully watch for the changes that look small, but really substantially chip away at our freedoms.
God bless the troops in the Armed Forces of the United States. Whether they are manning a road block in Iraq, or flying over Afghanistan, they have to be vigilant to do their jobs. We can honor their sacrifices by being equally vigilant of our lawmakers. The price of freedom is vigilance, both abroad and at home.
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