By Jesse J. Porter Jr., C.P.M., FSA
Traffic stops are among the most common things a patrol officer does. They are also among the least predictable.
Every stop is a series of decisions, and each one either preserves your options or takes one away.
After 33 years in policing and years reviewing traffic-stop cases in litigation, I reached one conclusion: The officers who consistently perform best are not the fastest or the most aggressive. They are the best decision-makers.
This is a decision-making article, not a tactics manual. Your agency teaches tactics. These five principles strengthen the judgment behind them.
1. Know your why, and know yourself
Scenario: 2340 hours. You’ve just cleared a fight call. Your sergeant chewed you out 20 minutes ago. A sedan rolls through a stop sign. Your hand reaches for the light switch. Pause. Why are you making this stop? What do you want to accomplish?
Before your lights come on, answer three questions.
- What is the violation?
- Why am I making this stop?
- What do I want to accomplish?
Those answers determine everything that follows: your urgency, your tone and your decisions.
There’s one more question: What are you bringing to the stop? A hard call. A long shift. An argument with your sergeant. An argument at home. You cannot leave those behind, but you should recognize you’re carrying them.
Approach to assess the situation, not to punish the violation.
On your next stop: Name the reason and the goal before the lights come on, then take one honest second to check what you are carrying to the window.
2. Gather information before you create risk
Scenario: You light up a pickup with three occupants. As it coasts to the shoulder, the passenger turns to look back at you twice, and the driver leans hard toward the console. Dispatch has not returned the tag yet, and your door is already half open.
That half-open door can wait. The best time to gather information is before you step out of the cruiser, and that pickup is offering plenty. Occupants repeatedly looking back, unusual movement inside the vehicle or hands disappearing from view may not mean danger, but they are information worth noting before you close the distance.
Run the tag, watch the occupants and wait for the return. Information creates options. Better information leads to better decisions. The officer who approaches with options is calmer, clearer and harder to surprise than one who walks up blind.
On your next stop: Slow down the front half. Spend the seconds before you exit gathering facts, not closing distance.
3. Take the unknown seriously without treating everyone like a threat
Scenario: The driver’s hands shake as he digs for his license. His voice cracks, and he will not hold eye contact. You have seen this before: in an impaired driver, in a man with a warrant and in a teenager in his father’s car who is simply terrified. Which one is this?
You do not yet know which driver you have. Stay alert and cautious. Unknown does not mean dangerous. Nervous does not mean guilty.
The windshield has two sides. Officers and drivers arrive at the same stop carrying different fears. That driver has heard the stories and seen the videos, and he may be more afraid of you than you would guess. Sometimes those concerns collide.
Reading his fear accurately is not dropping your guard. The officer who treats every nervous driver as a potential ambush burns up the attention he needs to recognize a real threat.
React to what the person is doing, not to the worst story running through your head. Potential danger may be indicated by behavior you can describe: hands dropping below the window line, weight shifting to the strong side, a glance toward your weapon or an unusual calm after agitation. None of these behaviors alone establishes a threat. What matters is the context, the totality of what you observe and whether the person’s actions give you an objectively reasonable basis for concern. Attitude alone is not a threat indicator.
Articulate what you saw, not just what you felt. It keeps you safer at the window and clearer if you ever must explain the stop.
On your next stop: Stay alert, but respond to observable behavior in context, not to a bad attitude or the worst stop you have ever heard about.
4. Preserve your options
Scenario: The car stops in a dark lot instead of on the shoulder. You can walk straight to the driver’s window now or take 10 more seconds to reposition your cruiser, angle your approach or wait for the cover unit, two minutes out. Nothing about the violation tells you which choice is right.
If circumstances allow, those 10 seconds are worth spending. Time, distance, position, communication, cover and backup are all ways of buying yourself room to think and choose. Preserve them early. Once they’re gone, your choices narrow fast.
Your legal authority is another option to preserve. Whren establishes the legal basis for the stop. Mimms and Wilson address authority to order occupants out of a lawfully stopped vehicle. Rodriguez limits how long the stop may last. Graham governs the objective reasonableness of force. Barnes v. Felix reinforces that courts must consider the totality of the circumstances when evaluating an officer’s use of force, rather than focusing exclusively on the final moments before force was used. That does not mean every earlier tactical decision independently determines whether force was constitutional.
Know these decisions well, along with applicable state law and agency policy. They help define the legal boundaries within which you make decisions.
On your next stop: Ask what is protecting your options: time, distance, position, communication, backup and the law. Do not surrender any of them out of habit or hurry.
5. The stop is not over until it is over
Scenario: The citation is signed, and the conversation stayed polite the whole way. You turn toward your cruiser, already composing the next call in your head. Behind you, the driver has just learned he is going to court, and his door is opening.
That opening door is the moment many officers never see coming. Officers can be surprised when they relax too early.
The legal detention may be over, but your need for situational awareness is not. The citation may be written, the documents returned and the conversation concluded, but you still need to remain alert as you disengage and return to your cruiser.
The hand-back. The second approach, if one is necessary and lawful. The moment the driver learns the outcome. Those are moments when attention can drop and trouble can start.
Maintaining awareness does not mean prolonging the stop without legal justification. It means continuing to assess your surroundings and the occupants’ behavior as the encounter ends.
On your next stop: Give the back half of every stop the same attention as the front. Do not mentally clear it before you have safely disengaged.
One question to carry
In the litigation files I review, the force event rarely stands alone. It sits at the end of a chain of decisions that narrowed the officer’s options until only bad ones remained. Every decision either preserved an option or gave one away. The stops that end well are built the same way.
Carry one question into your next stop and every stop after it: What decision, right now, gives me the best options if this encounter changes?
About the author
Jesse J. Porter Jr., C.P.M., FSA, is a retired Metropolitan Police Department (Washington, D.C.) lieutenant who served 33 years in patrol, specialized operations and command. He directed the MPD Tactical Training Center, training more than 6,200 sworn personnel in use of force, patrol tactics and de-escalation. Since 2020, he has provided police practices and use-of-force litigation analysis through Porter Tactical Analysis Group (PTAG). He is a Force Science Analyst and an FBI National Academy graduate. Contact him at answers@porterconsultingandtraining.com.
