| Sort of, unfortunately. Drugs laws, and the Court's interpretation of handling drug crimes gives officers a lot of latitude. I forget the name of the Court case that allows officers to intuit that ANY drug-related offender can be presumed to have a weapon, but the data was actually fairly compelling (without knowing how the data was derived, the outcome was pretty clear—statistical significance that people with drugs are likely to have weapons. There's also a lot of law about "the person was a SUSPECTED drug offender" because they drove erratically, or were in the wrong neighborhood, or threw something out of the car..... basically anything, and those people can be treated much like folks found to have drugs on them in the first place. But, if there is no reason to truly arrest someone, the search / seizure shouldn't take place. You usually don't get arrested for minor ordinances... (tickets, lane violations, etc.) My example was more or less just a common example. To my mind, if someone was arrested for selling pirated software on jump-drives, the officer would likely be able to check out the call log to look for other conspirators. |