Quote:
Originally Posted by 19Yzerman19
Yes they absolutely can search your person - they'll do a pat-down and anything "hard", i.e. plastic, metal, etc can be removed. It's justified at any roadside stop on the basis of "officer safety". I.e., you might have a knife. It would actually be much, much harder for them to justify a search of, say, your glove box than a search of you!
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On what grounds? Yes, you can pat a person down for officer safety but you can't just pull a guy over based on the grounds you believe he is operating an illegal detector and pat him down. That is how you get sued. You cannot search a person for a radar detector, even if you found it you can't take it, you have zero grounds to seize it. The pat down for officer safety is there for when you believe their is a situation where your safety or another person's safety may be in jeopardy because you believe the person either has a weapon or is being violent. You can't just start patting people down without grounds.
Reasonable grounds to an officer are defined as the facts or circumstances that would cause a normal prudent person a strong belief beyond a mere suspicion. It would not be harder to search the vehicle because the officer would have a strong belief beyond a mere suspicion that there was a radar detecting device being operated inside the vehicle and can therefore articulate in a court of law why he had the right to look in the vehicle. It is Ontario law. He cannot however search a person for that device.