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a computer system called WALES, the Washington Area Law Enforcement System, which taps into a criminal database to check for outstanding warrants. The driver came up clean, so Neill let him go with a cheery farewell and a “Have a good evening.” He didn’t think he missed anything by not searching. “He was too calm. He wasn’t nervous.”
    How the most upstanding citizen, blinded by spotlights and surrounded by cops, could seem anything but nervous was a mystery to me, but Neill was sure he could tell. “If I ask him the questions, ‘Are you carrying any guns or drugs?’ and he immediately breaks into a sweat, that’s a clear indication that he has a weapon and he may get to that weapon, and what you want to do is—you’re allowed to protect yourself,” Neill said. Indeed, the line of cases from
Terry
is predicated on a safety concern: that an officer should not have to endanger himself by refraining from a search if he believes the subject is armed.
    “We take it instinctively,” Neill said. “You’re in a situation, you can kind of get that hair or chill coming up your back. Kind of like, your caution is aroused for whatever reason. And so it’s hard to explain that situation in paperwork. And then come to a jury and also explain the same thing?” Heshrugged at the impossibility of conveying the nuances of a policeman’s labors to a layman. “While people may want you to do your job, they may not necessarily want to know
how
you do your job.”
    Some judges think Neill’s telltale signs of gun possession are enough for reasonable suspicion, others do not. Those keen to expand police power may credit a cop’s perception of someone’s jitters. But the opposite view was taken by the federal appeals court in the D.C. Circuit, which ruled in 2007 that suspecting a person of carrying a gun “must be based upon something more than his mere nervousness. A person stopped by the police is entitled to be nervous without thereby suggesting he is armed and dangerous or, indeed, has anything to hide,” the court said. “Were nervous behavior alone enough to justify the search of a vehicle, the distinction between a stop and a search would lose all practical significance, as the stop would routinely—perhaps invariably—be followed by a search.” 13
    Cops are nervous, too, since 109 of the 578 officers murdered nationwide from 1999 through 2009 were killed during traffic stops. 14 The police, and even some of their targets, tend to see a search as defusing danger. “The frisk doesn’t just protect the officers,” Neill said one day. “It also protects the person you’re friskin’ because you eliminate the possibility that they may have a weapon so you can relax a little bit more. You know, it’s for their protection and our protection, ’cause we don’t want to be standing there talking to an armed suspect and have to worry about gettin’ shot or havin’ to shoot somebody. You don’t want to—you never want to have to shoot anybody. But sometimes you have to.” Neill had done it twice, once wounding a fleeing man who raised a gun, once killing an unarmed man high on PCP who tried to carjack Neill’s vehicle. So, the frisk had become standard operating procedure.
    Patting down people in such circumstances gave Justice Antonin Scalia constitutional misgivings, suggesting that had he been on the Court when
Terry
was decided in 1968, he might have authorized the stop but not the frisk before a full arrest. “I frankly doubt,” he wrote in 1993, “whether the fiercely proud men who adopted our Fourth Amendment would have allowed themselves to be subjected, on mere suspicion of being armed and dangerous, to such indignity.” 15
    Although the indignity of searches wasn’t mentioned by Scalia in 2008, when he wrote a landmark opinion on the Second Amendment right to keep guns at home, the ruling—if gradually expanded through litigation—could eventually reduce or eliminate such confrontations