Joe David, who retired from California Highway Patrol in 2003, is president and lead interdiction guru at Desert Snow, a narcotics interdiction training program David founded in 1989. In a recent conversation Police1, David provided a reminder to highway interdiction officers on checking fuel tanks in the vehicles they stop.
“I think officers have a heck of a time checking fuel tanks. One of the things that officers can do is, if they have a scope, they can push the scope down in the fuel tank of a passenger car and they’re able to look around. This way they can see packages or whatever is the case. That’s okay, but there are different styles of fuel tanks, and some tanks are multi-chambered tanks. If the officer doesn’t know that, then there’s no way they’ll know that they can’t see all the way to the back of the tank. Therefore, they could overlook a half or a third of the tank.”
How do you remedy this? You use a magnifying glass. Here’s how.
Most fuel tanks today have a “sending unit” which is attached to, but separate from, the fuel pump (remember, in order to prevent car fires in the case of a collision, fuel pumps on most newer cars are now located inside the fuel tank itself). As a consequence of this construction, most cars (not all) have an access panel for the maintenance or replacement of the fuel pump and sending unit. Normally, says David, this access is provided underneath the back seat or in the trunk.
“The officer needs pull the cushion from the back seat of the vehicle they’re checking and see if there’s a sending unit underneath there. In the trunk they’ll have to lift the carpet up. They’ll see a metal piece that’s going to be six inches square — maybe it might be round, who knows, different manufacturers make it different ways. They’ll see a metal plate there, and it’ll be bolted down with maybe four or five bolts. This is what they’re going to have to remove.”
This is technically very easy to accomplish, but the courts are going to say, ‘Oh my God, that’s terrible,’ and supervisors are going to say, ‘Oh my God, that’s terrible.’
“We’ve got to go into court and say, ‘This is why we did this, and this led us to this, and this led us to this.’ So here’s what the officer has to do first. He needs to take a good look at that with a magnifying glass to see if it’s been recently tampered with. So then the officer can say why he did what he did—this is why he took that apart. If he has a magnifying glass, which we have in all of our classes, you’ll easily be able to see whether it’s been recently removed or tampered with.”
Like slowly peeling an onion, at every subsequent level you use that magnifying glass to detect (and a camera to document) your reason for getting into the suspect’s fuel tank in this manner.
