Hey guys, it's Anthony Bandiero here with Blue to gold Law Enforcement Training. I'm in Scotch Plains New Jersey teaching advanced search and seizure. And I'm going to answer a question today that I know a lot of you have on your mind. Can you search a vehicles passenger for marijuana? And the answer is, probably, but I have to go into some, you know, legal reasoning here because the answer is really not that clear. In some regards, this video is probably going to be more than average, I try to keep my videos all under five minutes, this one is probably going to go a little longer. But let me dive right into it. Here's what the Supreme Court has told us about passengers. There's two key cases I want you to know about. Before we dive into a little more discussion about the marijuana issue. One, back in the 1940s, the US Supreme Court said that if you have probable cause for the vehicle, right, that there's something in a vehicle, it doesn't give you automatic right? To search passengers, you have to have a Nexus that just makes sense. If you pull over a vehicle, and let's say it's Uber, and you find drugs on the Uber driver, certainly that would not give you probable cause in and of itself to search some passenger who does not know that Uber driver. The other case, happened 1970s. And what happened there is the officer gave the driver a citation for speeding, and then did a search incident to arrest. Well, the logic here and I do hear cops, you know, saying this, and they're kind of taught this way is that a citation is in lieu of arrest you have you heard that before? Right? It's like, I'm not, I'm kind of like a rescue, but you're going to be free to go. That's an old school language from some court cases, quite frankly, I don't teach it because I see no value in it. If you have even if you have an arrestable offense, let's say a suspended license, and your state allows you to arrest somebody for a suspended license, but you're just going to cite and release them, you get none of the benefits of an arrest, you get no search, you have to be diligent in your time, and so forth. So there's no value in saying it's Aluma. Rest, from our perspective, from the law enforcement, or maybe academically, it's, it's, it's in lieu of arrest, let the prosecutors enjoy that doctrine, if it gives them anything, but for you, it gives you nothing new, they're having arrest or you don't, if you don't have an arrest, it's treated like a Terry stop, even though you're citing the person. All right, now let's move into the marijuana discussion. If you have probable cause, that a passenger has drugs on them, like marijuana, and you are not intending to arrest, that's where the problem comes in. When you do a search of somebody person, and it's not for weapons, that is arrest, like, in other words, if if you have a passenger probably cause that they have drugs in their pocket, you go right into the pocket and pull out the drugs. That type of action is arrest like meaning it needs to be supported by probable cause. And you probably technically arrested them, even though they may not go to jail that day. That is actually not a big deal. The fact that they don't go to jail, but still you have, you know, essentially did a search incident to arrest. That's the only exception. We do not have an exception at the Supreme Court level that says if you have probable cause that somebody has evidence on their person that in and of itself allows you to search the person, you know, for example, you have probable cause that somebody has drugs in their backpack and they're walking down the street. Do you have automatic authority to stop the person and search the backpack? Under some recognized exception of search one requirement?