A police officer can take your cash during a traffic stop
Are you one to carry cash around? You should know that a police officer can seize your money under certain traffic stop conditions. Let’s review three of them, plus watch a lawyer’s tips on how to answer a couple of common traffic stop questions.
A police officer can take your cash in a traffic stop under these three conditions:
- Search
- Arrest
- Forfeiture (criminal and civil)
Say a police officer pulled you over for not using your turn signal. During the traffic stop, they might notice something that makes them suspicious. They might ask you to allow them to search your vehicle.
At this point, any (decent) lawyer will say you need to decline a search. Now, they might already have probable cause for a search. For example, if you have illegal drugs on the passenger seat in clear view. In that case, they won’t need your permission to search your car since the officer now has probable cause.
If a legal search reveals a large sum of cash, the officer can seize the money. For instance, they might suspect that you’re engaging in drug trafficking and link the cash to this crime.
If you’re arrested during a traffic stop and carrying cash on your person, a police officer can also seize that money. This is because they will empty your pockets. Again, the officer might suspect your cash is connected to a crime. As such, they can seize the money instead of booking it as your personal property.
In criminal forfeiture situations, police officers can seize cash found during traffic stops that they suspect is connected to a crime. This can include money laundering, drug trafficking, fraud, or other organized crime.
You might not get your cash back
Civil forfeiture is sometimes obscure and difficult to navigate. In cases of civil forfeiture, police can seize and even keep cash until the owner proves the money wasn’t earned in connection to a crime.
According to CriminalDefenseLawyer.com, in any forfeiture cases, cash owners are often put through time-consuming, expensive legal processes to get their money back. In many cases, folks walk away from the money, citing the trouble they’d have to go through to regain their property.
Law By Mike, a lawyer’s tip page with an 8.7 million following, shared some ways to address common questions asked by police officers during a traffic stop:
