Officers Can Order Passengers Out of Car, Justices Decide

Police can order all the passengers, as well as the driver, to get out of the car during a traffic stop, even when they have no reason to suspect danger or wrongdoing, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.

On a 7-2 vote, the justices said that the need to protect an officer’s safety outweighs the privacy rights of innocent passengers.

“Regrettably, traffic stops may be dangerous encounters,” said Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. In 1994 alone, 11 officers were killed and 5,762 were assaulted or injured during traffic stops or pursuits, he said.

Wednesday’s ruling does not say that police officers must or should order passengers out of cars, only that the decision to do so lies entirely with them.

The court ruled 20 years ago that police can routinely order drivers out of the car during traffic stops. But until Wednesday, many courts have assumed that an officer needs at least some specific reason or suspicion before ordering a passenger to get out and possibly be frisked.

Dissenting justices said that the ruling takes away the privacy protections of tens of millions of innocent passengers. The 4th Amendment bans “unreasonable searches and seizures” by the government, and in years past, the court regularly said that officers needed a “particularized suspicion” before invading a person’s privacy.

But more recently, the court under Rehnquist has upheld broad and routine searches by police even in instances where officers have no reason to suspect that an individual did anything wrong.

In 1989, the court upheld sobriety roadblocks on the highways and Wednesday’s decision brought to three the number of pro-police rulings in traffic cases in less than a year.

In June, the court said that police can use trivial traffic violations as a reason to stop a car and search a motorist. That decision, in Whren vs. United States, upheld a common technique in the war on drugs. Police in Washington, D.C., were stopping cars that eased through stop signs in a neighborhood where drug use was rampant.

Though the court agreed that the traffic stop was a pretext to search for drugs, it unanimously upheld the stop anyway.

In November, the court said in Ohio vs. Robinette that police who stop a motorist can press to search the entire vehicle and its trunk, even though they have no reason to suspect wrongdoing. The ruling reversed a decision of the Ohio courts, which said that motorists must be told they are free to go after dealing with a traffic violations.

The latest decision stems from an incident on the evening of June 8, 1994, when a state trooper spotted a car driving on I-95 near Baltimore without a license tag. After speaking to the driver, he noted that the front-seat passenger was extremely nervous and he ordered him to get out of the car. When he did, the passenger, Jerry Wilson, dropped crack cocaine to the ground.

Wilson was arrested for drug possession but a Maryland court of appeals threw out the evidence on the grounds that the officer had no authority to order him out of the car.

Reversing that decision (Maryland vs. Wilson, 95-1268), Rehnquist said that the intrusion on the passenger’s privacy was minimal and not a violation of the 4th Amendment.

In a partial dissent, Justices John Paul Stevens and Anthony M. Kennedy agreed that the passenger in this case could have been searched but they disagreed with giving the police blanket authority to order such searches of passengers.

“The practical effect of our holding in Whren [in June] is to allow the police to stop vehicles in almost countless circumstances,” Kennedy said. “When Whren is coupled with today’s holding, the court puts tens of millions of passengers at risk of arbitrary control by the police.”

In Los Angeles, Police Cmdr. Tim McBride said that the department was “gratified with this decision. It improves officer safety and improves our ability to investigate multiple suspects.”

McBride said that Los Angeles police officers in the past have not removed passengers from vehicles unless they had probable cause. “This widens our scope to investigate and to protect the officers and the community,” he said.

Hal Snow, assistant executive director of the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, said that he does not expect the public will notice much change.

“Police are not going to begin wholesale extrication of passengers,” Snow said. “That would not be consistent with good police work and good citizen relations. It’s going to be done in cases when the officer feels there is a threat to himself or the public.”

Times staff writer Matt Lait in Los Angeles contributed to this story.