Mostly clear. Low 69F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph..

Mostly clear. Low 69F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph.

Editorials represent the institutional view of the newspaper. They are written and edited by the editorial staff, which operates separately from the news department. Editorial writers are not involved in newsroom operations.

Aiken County sheriff's deputies have been pulling over commercial buses to conduct warrantless drug searches on Interstate 20, which winds through Aiken County on its way between Atlanta and Columbia. File/Shiann Sivell/Aiken Standard

Aiken County sheriff's deputies have been pulling over commercial buses to conduct warrantless drug searches on Interstate 20, which winds through Aiken County on its way between Atlanta and Columbia. File/Shiann Sivell/Aiken Standard

You're innocently sleeping in a hotel room when police burst through the door, say you can’t leave, ransack your belongings, destroy a suitcase and break some of your possessions as they toss them carelessly out of your luggage.

This didn’t happen because the police had any reason to believe that you had done anything illegal. It wasn’t even a case of breaking down the wrong door. Rather, the hotel where you were staying was late paying its property taxes, so police took the position that this violation of the law gave them the legal right to search everyone and everything on the property.

If that sounds perfectly reasonable, then you don’t need to bother reading the rest of this editorial. If not, read on, because that’s essentially what’s been happening along Interstate 20 in Aiken County, according to the latest installment of The Post and Courier’s Uncovered investigative series. Only the hotel wasn’t actually late in paying the taxes.

As our reporting partner the Aiken Standard revealed, Aiken County sheriff’s deputies have made a practice of pulling over commercial buses on Interstate 20 for minor traffic infractions and then conducting warrantless drug searches. In some cases, the deputies didn’t even ticket the driver for the supposed traffic infraction; in at least one case, there was no evidence that the bus’s front tire had actually veered into another lane, as the deputy claimed.

During the trial of someone arrested on drug charges during a 2018 stop, the arresting officer testified that he had previously stopped and searched 20-30 commercial buses for minor traffic violations in the early morning hours. The newspaper obtained copies of 11 more incident reports of drug seizures that this officer and three other deputies had made on commercial buses from 2014 to 2022, which suggests that deputies are making a lot of similar stops that don’t result in charges.

Although Aiken County Sheriff Michael Hunt refused to talk to the paper, his department defended the policy of stopping buses for minor traffic violations and using that as a pretext to bring in a drug-sniffing dog while a busload of passengers is stranded in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere.

The department says stopping the buses is an important crime-fighting tool because drug smuggling is a known problem on the interstate and it’s easy to smuggle drugs on a bus, since its bags aren't subject to search like luggage on airplanes. That’s like saying searching hotel rooms along the interstate is a good way to catch drug smugglers because people who drive on the interstate often stay overnight there.

The Aiken department’s fixation on searching for drugs on I-20 carries an uncomfortable reminder of the narcotics interdiction operation that then-Florence County Sheriff Kenny Boone ran before he was caught embezzling money from the assets that his agency seized during those stops.

The bus stops are modeled on pretextual traffic stops with which we’ve all become familiar as the source for critics’ complaints about police stopping people for “driving while black.” But even if you think those stops are a prudent way to catch bad guys, the bus stops are significantly different.

When you’re driving your own car, you at least theoretically have some control over whether you do anything to attract police attention. And even if the police pull you over because they imagined your tires strayed onto the lane divider on an empty street, you can still influence the outcome of the encounter by being ridiculously submissive and apologetic. And even if the officer illegally searches your vehicle anyway, he’s not going to find anything illegal unless you put it there. Well, unless he plants it there, and if that’s the kind of cop you're dealing with, there’s nothing you could do to prevent it anyway.

But when you’re on a bus, you have no control over whether the driver drives too fast or veers into another lane. You have no control over whether the driver sasses the officers and gets them angry. You have no control over whether other passengers pack drugs in their luggage or whether your suitcase is close enough to a bag with cocaine that the cops bust it open and scatter your possessions all over the side of the road. There is nothing you can do to avoid such a scenario — except perhaps stay off of buses, or at least buses that pass through Aiken County after midnight.

The good news is that S.C. Circuit Judge Clifton Newman tossed out the 2018 drug charges in December, ruling that deputies lacked probable cause to stop the bus and search its passengers. While the ruling unfortunately meant that someone smuggling illegal drugs got away with it, it's good because it might convince the sheriff that such stops are not a good use of his time and resources.

The bad news is that the sheriff’s office and the solicitor are still defending the stops, which suggests that they will continue. While the Legislature finally passed a smart police reform law this month, it’s aimed at stopping the more critical but less common problem of abuse of force, not situations where officers are violating people's rights, apparently with the approval of their agencies.

We hope now that this policy has been exposed, Sheriff Hunt will instruct his deputies to stop the pretextual bus stops. If he doesn’t, or if we find out about other agencies that are doing the same thing, the Legislature should put some constraints on such practices next year.

The Post and Courier 148 Williman Street Charleston, SC 29403

News tips/online questions: newstips@postandcourier.com

Delivery/subscription questions: subserve@postandcourier.com