Finally got my own truck

Wrong. The sleeper part of the truck is my homestead but it doesn't really matter because if it's OK to for them to search your truck at will by the same token it's OK for them to search your house,car or your pockets.
How can I know you don't keep some poor girl (or a guy for that matter) in your house as a sex slave? Do you mind if I take a peek?

 

I dunno how you can sit there and justify an unreasonable search of a truck cab. That's not how it's supposed to be in the good ol USA.

 

A commercial vehicle traveling on a public road is not a house. Ridiculous argument.

 

Im not saying its right. But the courts have ruled against us. The case wasn't specifically about trucks, it involved an rv, but the context is the same. The only time an rv has the same protections as a permanent dwelling is when it is parked in a log term lot such as an rv park and hooked up to power and water. Rest areas and truck stops are considered short term parking.

 

Case law (law decided by the outcome of court cases) is an interesting animal. If a case is decided by the Supreme Court it is the law in all states. But if the case has only been decided in the 9th circuit, for example, then that case outcome only applies as law in states within the 9th circuit.

I ran into having to pay attention to case law when starting a business, on advice from the lawyer that helped set up my LLC and advised how to proceed without any non-compete agreement. Even without a NCA I had to abide by case law that established the rule of interference. I couldn't interfere with customer relationships with my previous employer. Instead I had to get WRITTEN requests from customers that they wanted to do business with me.

Now I had always thought that as a truck driver in a highly regulated industry we were exempt from the normal standards of searches. But this seems to be much more a gray area than I thought. IMHO some truckers go overboard protecting their rights, especially the YouTube queens that post videos at border patrol check points. The bottom line is be cooperative, have your ducks in a row, and remember that LEO is a fellow citizen.

 

How do you know?
By common sense. By looking at a man and talking to him. By judging him. By his demeanor. By letting your brain work and let it draw conclusions. You have to let it, the brain, help you see a God fearing man from a weirdo. It may not work all the time but most of the time. So if there is a cop with competence, using his or her brain, and they can smell, hear and see something fishy (after all they're supposed to be trained for that), yes, if they see something weird in their judgment, I want them to hop on the truck and perhaps not necessarily to prowl through all the drawers and cabinets but at least take a look, take a listen and make a little sound judgment. It is a different matter if they're abusing their authority to find loose leaf pages thrown under the mattress.

A truck on a road is never a homestead even if you live in it. A dog house could be a homestead on a private land, and that doghouse could not be searched without a warrant.
And yeah sex offenders, child molesters, anyone who had anything to do with this sort of s...t should have their houses searched at random. As far as I am concerned they forfeited their privacy rights forever.
I will withdraw myself from this discussion, before it I say something to jeopardize the whole thread.

 

I am only talking about the reasonable situations. And the honest cops. You know... Dirty Harry types, should know when reasonable situations present themselves. I believe U.S. is a place where there is still Law and Order like nowhere else in the World, and cops are serving people like nowhere else in the World. I have a comparison, so you can trust me on that.

 

If you give an inch they'll take a mile. I guess you came from somewhere where the police have no such restraints and generally push around getting whatever they want without question? I get what you're saying. But you still think foreign if you think it's OK for cops to selectively toss someone's rig because the cop just thinks they look weird or something. They know they'll get away with it. That's not how it's supposed to work. Now we know in the real world that's how it goes until they screw up and do it to some 7 year law student that videos them on you tube and files a suit. But it shouldn't be that way.

 

I understand privacy concerns. In fact I got thrown off another trucking website run by a snowflake trucker named Brett after he started editing my posts in a thread about driver facing cameras, and I called him on his crap.

You can have a desire for privacy that is greater than your legal rights to privacy. Most of us do.

First, almost everyone on the road has a horror story about an idiot driver.

Second, a lot of us are VERY independent and resent being told what to do or how we can do it.

Third, a lot of us do not like the laws that restrict what we can earn.

Idiot + stubborn + rebellious = problem

Now, most of us do not combine those things. Most of us probably only match one of those descriptions, or possibly even none. But law enforcement can't know that.

Implied consent as a truck driver basically means that if you operate a CMV, you give up some of your privacy rights. This is meant to allow law enforcement to protect the rest of us, and our families, from stubborn idiot rebel truck drivers.

I resent the fact that my truck can be searched without a warrant, but I have to accept it if I want to be a driver.

Trying to compare a house to a CMV truck is a losing argument. You can't run over a family on vacation in your house.