There are multitudes of ways in which American police officers trample on people's constitutional rights. They demand ID when they don't have the legal right to do so, they detain people in situations (and for longer periods of time) where they don't have the legal right to do so, they commit assault and battery when they don't have a legal reasonable reason to do so, they enter private homes illegally, they prolong traffic stops for much longer than they have the legal right to, and so on and so forth. The list is endless.
One form of rights violation that gets very little attention, though, is using an "inventory search" as an excuse to illegally search the car of a driver they have arrested, for the purposes of trying to find anything illegal in the car, for extra charges.
An "inventory search" of a car is a legit thing in the United States. However, there are very specific laws governing it, and these have been affirmed several times by courts.
An inventory search is done when a driver is arrested and his or her car is impounded (usually because there's no other person, eg. a spouse, who the car can be given custody of.) In fact, an inventory search is mandatory in this situation: Its purpose is to inventory the contents of the car, writing a meticulous detailed list of said contents, so that it's made sure that everything is returned to the owner afterwards, and nothing goes missing. These inventory searches are standardized in most states, ie. how they are done, and how the contents of the car are written down in an official document.
American courts have ruled several times that "inventory search" cannot be used as an excuse on the field, where the driver was stopped and arrested, in order to just search the car in order to find something illegal in it. Doing this has been ruled again and again to be a breach of the 4th Amendment.
Yet, this is being done constantly, pretty much every single day, in the United States: The police stop a car, and if the driver is arrested, they will search the car, using an "inventory search" as an excuse, in order to find anything illegal. The only thing illegal here is the search itself.
One clear telling sign that distinguishes an actual legal inventory search from an illegal search that these police officers do is that they are not taking any notes. They don't have an official document where they are writing down every item they find. They just rummage through the car in order to find stuff, and that's it. They don't write down anything.
That's how you know it's an illegal search. And you see it all the time.
And the worst thing about it is that almost nobody knows it's illegal. Almost everybody just accepts it. In fact, "bootlickers" defend the practice. If you point out that the search is illegal they will hurry to defend the cops by claiming that it's an "inventory search". No amount of explaining to them that it can't be an inventory search because the standard protocols for that are not being followed, and that courts have repeatedly ruled about this, is going to dissuade them.
This is one of the most egregious breaches of the Constitution of the United States that cops get away with all the time. Most people don't even notice nor know that it's illegal. Nobody complains. Nobody sues the cops.
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