> Often officers simply wanted photographs.
> Other times they invented reasons to start a conversation.
> His favorite stop happened in a small mountain town in West Virginia.
> A traffic light turned red. Braithwaite stopped. The light turned green and he made a leisurely turn through the intersection.
> A few moments later, flashing lights appeared behind him.
> A police officer marched up to the banana and delivered the news.
> "'The reason I pulled you over, that light back there, you peeled out.'"
Their job is to take advantage of their authority to have fun at the expense of the time of citizens?
SCOTUS made race-based Kavanaugh Stops legal. Stipping a banana on wheels is a much lower bar
And it didn’t start there in Germany, either banana cars or death camps.
A giant banana car is the definition of unusual behavior, after all.
Society doesn't benefit from policing "Weird".
If a cop saw someone hiding in your bushes at 2am - stop and check it out, or nah?
The prioritization of a respect for authority over a respect for the rule of law is notoriously problematic in small town america in very real ways.
At even just 10 minutes a stop, that is over 30 hours of this poor man's life he has spent staring at the berries and cherries just because some entitled cop thought he deserved a photo op.
This man is driving a homemade banana car across the continent specifically because he wants the attention it garners. It's the whole point.
However we interacted as equals and I was free to refuse the conversation or end it when I wanted. I was free to set boundaries.
I would not feel the same if stopped by cops.
It's perfectly reasonable to question whether that vehicle is street legal when it passes by on the road. It would be my first thought. It looks like it's mounted on a boat trailer chassis, and the windshield appears to have questionable effectiveness at high speeds. Pulling him over to ask about it seems like they are doing their jobs. Especially when I am also a driver on the same road.
I understand your perspective, but viewing police as solely as a potential threat is not spreading whimsy.
What a privileged point of view. For a lot of people police are indeed nothing but a potential threat.
"Reasonable suspicion of a crime" is an objective legal standard that doesn't mean the same thing as "they look suspicious" or the situation itself is "suspicious" -- it means that the officer thinks that a specific articulable crime has, is, or is about to occur. They don't have to be 100% sure, and they don't even have to be correct about what the law even is, but they do have to believe a law was broken.
Being unusual by itself does not legally qualify for reasonable suspicion of a crime or infraction, because being unusual isn't a crime.
Now, the officer could be interested in the car because it is a banana, and want to stop it to take a picture of it, but they have to have suspicion of some specific violation first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whren_v._United_States
For example:
1. "Hey that banana car looks weird" > "it doesn't look like it has turn signals" > [pulls them over] > "hey do you have turn signals", "yes", "ok my bad have a nice day" = legal, because not having turn signals is an equipment violation.
2. "Hey that banana car looks weird" > [pulls them over] > "hey is this thing legal?" = illegal, because looking weird is not a crime
A cop sees what is clearly a hand-made banana car driving past them in the other direction on the road. What do you feel like are the appropriate actions for that cop to take in those circumstances, with just the facts available to them at hand?
I’m not arguing that the cops we have do not regularly and aggressively abuse their power and violate the social contract, but I’m struggling to see how we would want a cop to behave in an ideal world in this circumstance that isn’t “pull over the banana car and make sure it’s safe.” From the sound of it, they’re not ticketing the banana car, they obviously haven’t impounded it, and knock wood, they haven’t shot the driver yet, but what would your expectation be for them in that situation?
But other examples in the article like "Often officers simply wanted photographs." would not be a legal reason.
Now, in practice, this is a very easy standard to meet, because even if an officer wants to pull someone over arbitrarily, they can simply follow someone until they make a very minor infraction like crossing a line improperly, exceeding the speed limit by 1mph, rolling a stop, or failing to signal... but they still have to do it.
A belief that they have violated some law. They cannot do it for these reasons, from the article:
> Often officers simply wanted photographs.
> Other times they invented reasons to start a conversation.