A federal jury on Monday held Bexar County, Texas, accountable for systematically infringing the Fourth Amendment rights of thousands of Americans over the years through a specialized criminal interdiction unit. The verdict underscores that constitutional protections require searches to be reasonable and reject dragnet policing.
On March 16, 2022, Alek Schott was driving home from a work trip near San Antonio when a deputy from the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office stopped him for allegedly weaving between lanes. What began as a routine traffic stop escalated into an hourlong, unconstitutional inquiry. Rather than simply issuing a ticket, Deputy Joel Babb invited Schott to “step out and sit in [the police cruiser’s] passenger seat while I do your warning,” according to the complaint filed in federal court on behalf of Schott by the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm. Once inside the patrol car, Babb began questioning Alek about his employer, the purpose of his travel, and his residence while he pulled up Alek’s criminal history.
After interrogating Schott for about ten minutes, “Babb admitted the purpose of the stop was never really about a traffic violation,” the suit states. As part of the Criminal Interdiction Unit, Babb said he didn’t issue traffic tickets; instead, he stopped drivers to look for “human smuggling, drug smuggling, and all those things like that.” He proceeded to ask Schott about illicit drugs, whether he was carrying cash, and whether he would consent to a search of his vehicle.
But Schott refused. Nevertheless, the stop did not end there. After being denied consent to search and without evidence of any wrongdoing, Babb called for a K-9 unit to walk around the vehicle, according to the suit. When the K-9 unit finally arrived, body camera footage shows the officer guiding the dog around the truck. In Schott’s reflection, the officer gestures upward and toward the dog, and the dog then jumps up and places its paws on the vehicle as the officer records a positive alert.
For the next 40 minutes, Schott sat in the back of the police cruiser while officers rummaged through his truck. They found nothing.
Before letting him go, Babb handed Schott a copy of his “warning,” and “reassured [him] that he’d done his best to put everything back, ’cause nine times out of ten, this is what happens’—meaning that BCSO officers typically find nothing when searching a vehicle,” the complaint explains.
Schott’s dashcam footage later confirmed that he had never drifted lanes as Babb had alleged. Following the stop, he filed a complaint with the BCSO internal affairs department, alleging the stop was without cause, the detention extended beyond a reasonable period, and the search had no legitimate basis. The agency declined to take the complaint seriously, telling him, “If you don’t like how we conduct our business, you should file a…lawsuit,” the lawsuit states.
And so he did, unraveling a web of pretextual stops, unconstitutional searches, and broad government surveillance in the process.
The BCSO’s systematic violation of Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights unfolded in five steps, beginning with a nationwide network of license plate readers. These AI-powered cameras would alert local law enforcement to travel deemed “abnormal,” and BCSO deputies would then execute pretextual traffic stops to probe the suspicious drivers. Once pulled over, officers interrogated the drivers, and if they “refused to consent to a search, a K-9 alert from a manipulated dog supplied the probable cause to search anyway,” according to the Institute for Justice’s press release.
The Criminal Interdiction Unit “ran thousands of drivers through that routine—humiliating, invasive interrogations and searches of people who had done nothing wrong,” said Josh Windham, the nonprofit’s senior attorney, in a press statement. “It all rests on the idea that if you watch enough innocent people closely enough, criminals will fall out,” he added.
The Fourth Amendment requires officers to have real reasons to stop, hold, and search, according to Christie Hebert, an Institute for Justice attorney and lead counsel on Schott’s case, who spoke at a press conference on Wednesday. “Officers have to actually have a belief that you are committing a crime, and these officers didn’t have that,” she said, accusing the BCSO officers of dragnet policing, making everyone a suspect, and thinking they were above the Fourth Amendment. “Every agency in the state of Texas should be on notice that we are prepared to enforce this jury’s verdict.”
Along with the jury’s vindication of Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights, Schott was awarded $76 to represent a dollar for each minute he was unconstitutionally detained. “This is a major win for freedom of travel and constitutional rights,” Schott said during the press conference. “This has been a long process over four years to secure government accountability, and we finally have a jury that agrees what they did was unconstitutional.”
