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neither investigatory in nature, nor do they meaningfully prolong the stop. They are customary
cultural expectations and practices.” Id.
In the second category, ensuring officer safety, the Supreme Court has observed that
traffic stops are “especially fraught with danger to police officers, so an officer may need to take
certain negligibly burdensome precautions in order to complete the mission safely.” Rodriguez,
575 U.S. at 356 (quoting Johnson, 555 U.S. at 330); see also Maryland v. Wilson, 519 U.S. 408,
413 (1997) (“Regrettably, traffic stops may be dangerous encounters.”). Permissible inquiries
relating to officer safety include conducting a criminal record check, asking a driver to step out
of the vehicle, and asking whether there are weapons or anything dangerous in the vehicle.
Rodriguez, 575 U.S. at 356; Pennsylvania v. Mimms, 434 U.S. 106 (1977); Ross, 151 F.4th at
497. Unlike a general interest in criminal enforcement, however, the officer safety issue “stems
from the mission of the stop itself.” Rodriguez, 575 U.S.at 356. Notably, “[a]n officer’s
inquiries into matters unrelated to the justification for the traffic stop, th[e United States
Supreme] Court has made plain, do not convert the encounter into something other than a lawful
seizure, so long as those inquiries do not measurably extend the duration of the stop.” Johnson,
555 U.S. at 333.
In contending that the seizure exceeded the scope of a permissible traffic stop, Knight-
Walker chiefly relies on the United States Supreme Court’s Rodriguez decision. The issue in
that case was “whether the Fourth Amendment tolerates a dog sniff conducted after completion
of a traffic stop.” Rodriguez, 575 U.S. at 350. In Rodriguez, an officer stopped a vehicle for
driving on the shoulder of the highway. Id. at 351. The officer had finished asking the questions
related to the traffic stop, completed the necessary paperwork, and returned all the documents to
the driver and the passenger of the car. Id. at 351-52. Nevertheless, the officer detained the Jump to an indexed page (10 of 10)