East Coast police officer confirms that cops can always run your plates without probable cause
If you’ve ever found yourself driving in front of a police cruiser for more than a brief stretch, have you wondered whether they’re running your plates? Say you’re a legal resident, fully registered, insured, and licensed without anything of note on your record. Can a cop run your plates anyway, just because they feel like it? An active Rhode Island police officer says: Of course they can.
Police officers can run license plates whenever they want
Craig Sroka patrols for the Coventry, Rhode Island police department. He has more than 300,000 TikTok followers and more than 6,000,000 likes.
He justifies the idea of running plates at the officer’s distraction by explaining certain scenarios where it’s necessary. For example, he’s run plates that reveal the registered driver doesn’t have permission to drive, like a suspended or restricted license.
In other cases, the registered driver has an active warrant for their arrest. “Then I’ll look [up] the name, date of birth, and see if it matches…I can even bring up a picture,” Sroka explains.
Once he can confirm that the driver in question is more likely than not the registered owner, he’ll initiate a traffic stop. Depending on the interaction with the driver, it goes a variety of ways from there.
“Do I do this often? Yeah…I guess I do.”
“I never really thought about it, it’s such second nature,” he says, claiming it’s just muscle memory at this point. “This is how bad it’s gotten lately…”
The police officer goes on to explain that cops are trained diligently on muscle memory concepts, like drawing your department-issued firearm.
By this point, he’s used to unclipping his body cam from his uniform and docking it to download and recharge every time he enters the station during a shift. Each time he leaves, then, he grabs the readied cam and heads out the door.
These days, he finds he’ll automatically undock the cam and try to clip it onto his plain clothes when he’s leaving work. His brain just thinks he needs to grab it before heading out the door since he does it all day long during his shift.
Another example is that while driving his personal truck, Sroka will notice what thinks might be a speeding vehicle. He’ll quickly glance down at his moving radar screen…which isn’t there, of course, because he isn’t in his cruiser. His wife catches him turning his head and asks what the heck he’s doing.
After a few minutes, the police officer eventually apologizes for going off-track from the original question. “But yeah, I ran your plate.”
