leprechaun50 said:
Coloradokevin, If you were an leo in N.J. and stopped this person, who like it or not, was breaking the law in the state that you had sworn to uphold the law in, what would you have done?
I do not intend to be bashing you or other leo's, but I am curious how you would have handled it.
I'll tread lightly in answering this question, and provide two points to consider:
1) My oath of office is, first and foremost, to support and defend the constitution of the United States, then to enforce the laws of my state and municipality. While argument points made by others about police officers not being constitutional scholars is true, we also have a duty to enforce the law as best we can within our reasonable understanding of the constitution (the courts are there later, to debate whether our decisions on the street were right or wrong). I tend to tread carefully on constitutional issues, whether that means gun rights, rights to freedom of assembly, or protections against searches and seizures. If I feel that I'm treading on dangerous ground when it comes to the preservation of someone's rights, I'll typically take the cautious approach.
2) Discretion is, and always has been, an important element of law enforcement. Despite what some people claim, no one would truly want to live in a society where every law was rigidly enforced without exception. Discretion on a part of an officer generally works best when that discretion is applied with consistency. Discretion gets negative press when officers begin to inconsistently apply discretion to cases they're investigating (like letting the cute girl off from a speeding ticket while writing one to the nerdy guy, etc).
Let me give a simple example from my own practices that might demonstrate consistent application of officer discretion: If I stop someone for a traffic violation and they don't have proof of current and valid insurance I'm well within my rights to write them a ticket, regardless of anything else. However, it is my general practice to let this violation slide IF the person has left me reasonably convinced that they have insurance. This circumstantial proof may come in a variety of ways: a person might provide me with 6 years worth of expired insurance cards, including one that expired within the past couple of weeks, or maybe my clearance on the vehicle reveals an "insured" return on my MDT (which despite not being totally reliable, might sway me enough to let that violation slide). But, the key to this discretion is that it is consistent in the sense that I'll either write or warn based on a similar set of circumstances.
Anyway, back to a more direct discussion of this topic, all of this can be applied to other investigations, too. I generally choose to direct my efforts toward the suppression of violent crime, and serious offenses against property (burglaries, etc). Some officers like to primarily enforce traffic laws, and others are hell-bent on chasing narcotics all day. Some guys just like responding to their radio calls and doing whatever the call load dictates. Personally, without some indication that a person carrying a gun is involved in other types of criminal activity, I really have no particular interest in pursuing those individuals for the sake of enforcing statutes that have no direct benefit in the suppression of actual crime (after all, guns don't cause crime, people do)... I guess you could say that I like to focus my efforts on crimes that have victims, or are likely to produce victims.
Now, I'll say that as this thread has evolved further it appears that this convicted individual's reputation is looking less and less shiny. So, please take my points in more of a philosophical sense than anything else. I can't speak to the actual particulars of this exact situation.
All I'm really saying is that I wouldn't have searched the car merely because I saw a rifle case in the back seat. The courts have (thus far) upheld the officers decision to search this guy's vehicle on the basis of the "plain view" warrant exception, and I won't sit hear and try to argue that point either way. But, I still wouldn't have seen any reason to search the vehicle in the first place on the mere basis of seeing a rifle case. As such, I wouldn't have discovered that this guy's gun was loaded, or determined whether or not it contained "prohibited ammo". Why is it that I feel that way? Well, simply because I don't believe that the presence of a gun case (in the absence of other indicators of crime) gives me a reason to believe that the person who possesses that case is involved in criminal activity. Frankly, in my career I've generally found that the criminals who are armed are the least likely folks to be carrying their weapons in a case!
Again, your milage may vary.