You can't refuse a DOT inspection but...

Yes,preferably around the start of the year and wave at the scale operator.This should raise suspivion and get your sticker out of the way for the year.Just make sure your empty,heading back home with an hour to kill.JMO

 

Can you read people? I bet you can. Cops are trained to read people. Some are actually really good at reading people. Some people are really good naturally at reading others.

You walk in a bar, you look around. There's a fella standing across the room that sees you and he starts mean mugging you. Chest out, gut in, deepens his voice...you know, the rooster strut. He is your rival, your nemesis. You don't even know why. Why is he doing this? When we were young, we would rooster strut back at him and we would stay in opposite sides of the bar and know that if anything happens at all, if a pair of girls get to fighting in the women's restroom, you and that guy have to lock horns to see who rules the nest. When you get older, you see the rooster, you wave at him, "How ya doin Rooster!" Barkeep, get ol Rooster a beer on me."

Anyways, you can tell who is who if you can read people. You can tell a real cop from one of those pretender guys that buy old interceptors and drive around in all black clothes, by the way they drive. He can tell who you are by the way you drive. So, he decides to light you up. By the time he gets up to your door, he knows whether you are afraid, or threatened, or confrontational, or want to avoid him, or trying to hide something. If this is just another day at the office for you, he knows that too. "Random DOT inspection? Have at it."

Lots of people are nervous around cops. For some of you, it's 'he has a job to do just like I do'. Most cops aren't going to keep you to long if you aren't worried about what they do. They read you and figure there's no reason to look further. But have you ever met an A Game cop? Eyes in the back of his head. "Sees" everything. A living nightmare to those who go on the defensive. The cop that sees YOU on the two lane and know that you want to avoid him and out of all the trucks, he pulls YOU. "How did he know that I was going around the scale? There are other trucks...how did he get me?"

 

I’ve never gone more than 2 months without a current inspection sticker on my windshield (call it one of the joys of being a female operator, as most guys at my company haven’t had a level 1 in 5+ years yet I average 5 per year).

I’ve never had a DOT cop climb in the truck, let alone start pulling out stuff and throwing it outside.

The border officers occasionally hop in, rifle through a few things and hop out. Often when that happens, a drug sniffing dog will be paraded around the truck a few times and the cargo inspected. I’ve never heard or seen a border officer throwing a driver’s stuff out of the truck (and I cross 4x per week).

 

To answer your last question.
Pure chance. Most of the time after an inspection, I ask the officer, why he pulled me over. Truth or not, they say chance.

 

For me it is generally 1 of two things...observing an Out-of-Service violation or cell phone use. So for me, if you are not on your phone and have completed a pre-trip inspection and fixed any problems you are not very likely to get stopped by me. I personally rarely stop CMV's just by chance. And 99.9% of all citations I write are to passenger cars not CMV's.

 

"Most of the time."

 

I thought that was @ethos??

 

And just how will they be able to inspect that the required restraints have not been taken out? Or, for that matter, it hasn't been gutted and, for example like my CDL school, replaced with a bus seat to haul people, not be able to sleep in it?

 

I've seen a few people exit a truck that should have a bus seat in the sleeper.

 

Yep "Most of the Time" . Some inspectors won't give a reason.
Usually the reason given in a Weigh Station, the computer flagged you . Your company is due for an inspection.