It should be noted that the tracker did not say "property of the police" and if even it had, there's no way to know if it was the police (since cops don't tell people they're being investigated and someone else could put a stamp on their own tracker. And it's one police unit that has placed the tracker, dispatch or whoever you might call, won't know which unit placed the item or whether a unit did).

From article: "'What if it’s not the police’s tracker device?' asked Justice Geoffrey Slaughter. 'What if instead it belongs to the jilted girlfriend or the nosy neighbor? Is it also theft if he removes that device from his vehicle?'"

> "'What if it’s not the police’s tracker device?' asked Justice Geoffrey Slaughter. 'What if instead it belongs to the jilted girlfriend or the nosy neighbor? Is it also theft if he removes that device from his vehicle?'"

The thing to do is to call the police.

> However you may feel about the theft charge, if you find a tracker on your car, don't take it off.

Yes, but ...

> It's an occasion to call the police.

If you are a drug dealer it is an occasion to hide your supply extra hard. And use a second car/taxi for your drug dealing while using the compromised car for perfectly legal things like an upstanding citizen.

> If you are a drug dealer it is an occasion to hide your supply extra hard.

I suspect he did. Most likely the police planted the glass pipe that was found when searching for the tracking device so that they could obtain permission from the judge for the second search.

I upvoted this specifically so the people who still believe in the essential lawfulness of police would have a better chance of seeing it. The slang term is "testilying".

There is low conditional probability that a drug dealer smart enough to locate and remove a GPS tracker would put it in the same physical locker compartment as a crack pipe after taking it off.

Were I the judge, I would be especially wary of "automatic probable cause" objects that were coincidentally found with the search warrant target, namely "drug paraphernalia", "the distinctive odor of marijuana", and "the K-9 unit alerted".

Ask to see the glass pipe they found. Ask to see the photograph of it in situ next to the tracking device. Compare it very closely to evidence taken from previous drug cases. When the cops are unable to back up their bullshit story, throw their whole case out and cite someone for perjury.

> Were I the judge...

Your mental model of a typical American judges values is, unfortunately, unrepresentative in the extreme.

My mental model of the typical American judge involves a lot of corner-cutting, and disdain for actually doing the job of applying reason and wise judgment to real-world situations, instead of just following a checklist of established procedures and conforming to precedent.

Judges tend to rule in favor of lawyers that do most of their work for them. It's a lot easier to get an order if the lawyer submits a draft order, and the judge can just sign it.

I get it. I also like to slack off and get paid. To be perfectly honest, I'd probably only double-check the evidence if a random number generator said to do it, based on the pre-established sampling rate setting in my judge-automation program.

I suppose I misspoke, your mental model sounds accurate XD. I wish there were a mandated evidence double check sampling rate! The point I was making is that I suspect in most courtrooms the rate is effectively 0.

> so the people who still believe in the essential lawfulness of police

Your jaded perception of police is mistaken. You just hate the police and your argument doesn't make any sense.

> Ask to see the glass pipe they found. Ask to see the photograph of it in situ next to the tracking device. Compare it very closely to evidence taken from previous drug cases. When the cops are unable to back up their bullshit story, throw their whole case out and cite someone for perjury.

You want the judge to rule on a comparison of previous drug cases of how people store their drug pipes? The police need to back up their "bullshit" story because of this drug dealer didn't follow the drug pipe storage protocol others follow?

No. My initial presumption is that the pipe they found with the tracker was actually taken out of the evidence room, from a previous drug case, and planted at the search site solely to justify a further search elsewhere on the property. The comparison would be to see if they were using the same piece of evidence for multiple cases.

It probably would have been easier to just watch the bodycam and dashcam videos.

I imagine you can't just take a crack pipe from a previous case out of a police evidence room.

Imagine harder. Can you imagine a cop being worse at their job than everyone you currently work with? If people could not take things from evidence, evidence would not go missing. It happens less in larger departments that have more secure protocols for evidence handling, but in those cases, the stuff mainly gets stolen by evidence tech employees that know better how to cheat the system. It disappears just as surely as merchandise is stolen from Wal-Mart by its own employees.

Even if it was not evidence from another case, I don't think that new glass drug pipes are hard to obtain. After all, cocaine addicts that have smoked up everything else in their life can still get them. Cops have closer physical proximity to that lifestyle, and could pick up an abandoned pipe from one place, and later drop it where it would be more useful.

This type of misbehavior has been documented on bodycams, when the cop thought the recording device was on standby. Drop contraband, turn on bodycam, "find" contraband, arrest suspect for possession of contraband. Cops that cut corners to take down drug dealers--or other people whom they just know are guilty--think they are doing the right thing.

> And use a second car/taxi for your drug dealing

If you are a drug dealer and find a police tracker on your car, it's time to stop being a drug dealer.

If part of an organized ring I wonder how well acting as a dedicated decoy would pay off strategically.

Deliberately "cry wolf" with legitimate but shady looking shipments while other members carry out business. Of course that would make them and the organization lose their illegitimate income and the police likely outnumber them in particular even if there may be more smugglers total.

Of course long term thinking and crime for profit don't usually go together - quick gains and jackpots are the temptations in the first place.

Right or wrong aside, this is already illegal where I live by the same reason it is illegal to be sober and leave a bar as the designated decoy (ie: pretend to be drunk to distract an officer watching the bar for drunk drivers).

Larger scale smugglers/producers definitely do this, and yea, if you're a middle management drug dealer in one of those organizations, that's probably the play. But also they'll be getting spied on by federal/international organizations with better tools than physical magnetized trackers.

Clearly, the solution is to trade the car in.

They'll say the tracker must because of [dumb semi-plausible reason], nod at you, and keep it. Take it to a lawyer.

This is terrible advice, are you a lawyer?