When Florida Cops Act Like They’re Operating in California

Travis E. Smith and a friend spent Sunday, July 5^th shooting at his grandma’s rural property in Southwest Florida, about an hour north of his home in Pinellas Park. It was a good day, he thought. The pair set up their own targets and shot Smith’s two GLOCKs, a 12-gauge shotgun, a SAR USA 9mm pistol, a Ruger .22 pistol, an AR-10 that Smith had built himself, and what he believed was a Springfield AR pistol.

After dropping his friend off, Smith said he was nearing his home around midnight when he was stopped by a Pinellas Park police officer. Smith pulled into a restaurant’s parking lot.

The officer told Smith he stopped him because he had a “dim tag light.” Smith didn’t say anything to the officer at the time, but he strongly disagrees. His station wagon is nearly 40 years old and uses a bulb as its tag light instead of a brighter modern LED.

Smith’s buddy, who has a valid Florida medical marijuana card, had left an empty marijuana container on the back seat, which the officer saw. He told Smith the container was his “probable cause,” and that he was going to search the vehicle with or without Smith’s consent.

Smith, 28, was ordered out of the vehicle and told to take a seat on the curb. “He began to search and I was sitting there for nearly three hours,” Smith said. “I wasn’t worried. I had nothing to hide.”

The officer called for backup. Over the next several hours, nearly a dozen more officers arrived. Most wore uniforms except for one who wore civilian clothes, a face mask and a ballcap. They ran the serial number of every weapon through their dispatcher to make sure none were stolen. None were.

Things changed when the officers found Smith’s AR pistol. They measured the weapon and the barrel with a tape measure. They opened it up, which Smith believes was to make sure it had not been converted to full-auto. It hadn’t.

After the officers had talked for hours, one walked over, handcuffed Smith and placed him in the back of a squad car. “They read me Miranda and asked me a bunch of questions about the AR pistol,” Smith said. “I answered some. I didn’t know what the problem was.”

Smith had owned the AR pistol for nearly seven years. He found it on a website and had it shipped to his local gun dealer. He had mounted a red-dot sight and what he thought was an aftermarket brace. “I was under the impression it was totally compliant,” Smith said. “The brace was actually smaller than the one it came with. I thought it was a brace, not a buttstock.”

An officer then told Smith he was under arrest for possessing an unlicensed short-barreled rifle, or SBR, as the other officers loaded up all of Smith’s remaining weapons. “They took them all,” he said. “And all the ammo too.”

Before he was hauled away to jail, Smith said one of the officers told him: “Man, these are nice guns.”

At the county jail, Smith was stripped, searched, given a towel, a thin sleeping mat and sent to a cell. While in jail, Smith said he heard from four other inmates who said they too were stopped for either a “dim tag light” or window tint that officers claimed was too dark.

The next day, he was represented by a public defender at his first court hearing. Smith was charged with misdemeanor possession of marijuana for his friend’s empty container, and possession of an unlicensed SBR—a second-degree felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. He also received two traffic tickets, one for not wearing a seatbelt and the other for “no tag light.” All of the charges are for violating Florida state law. None were federal charges.

Before the hearing, Smith had no criminal history only a traffic ticket. “I have never been in trouble with the law,” he said. “I’m a Christian. I believe in Jesus. I wasn’t rude to the officers. I was ‘yessir,’ ‘yessir’ the whole time.”

No comment

Pinellas Park Police Chief Adam Geissenberger wasn’t willing to be interviewed for this story. Chief Geisenberger tried to pass multiple interview requests to his Public Information Officer, Lt. John Shea, but a lieutenant isn’t responsible for the overall conduct of the department’s officers, which is ultimately the responsibility of the chief of police.

“I have passed this along to Chief Geissenberger, and he has no statement on the incident,” Lt. Shea said in an email.

Brace or Stock?

Chris Brooks is a longtime gunsmith and firearm expert who has held nearly every job in the retail firearm industry. Smith works for one of Brooks’ friends, who texted him soon after Smith’s arrest.

“They reached out to me because they thought the cop was mistaken, that this was just a brace. They believed that Smith was in compliance. I may have burst their bubble, unfortunately,” Brooks said. “I can understand why they thought it was a brace, but it has some things that make it a stock. However, it’s a very grey area.”

Brooks classifies firearms and firearm parts for a major online retailer, but even he isn’t 100% sure that Smith had an SBR and not a pistol with a legal brace.

“I am not convinced that stock is a stock. It has an angle that makes it unique, brace-like. The portion that makes contact with your shoulder isn’t any larger than other braces. I am not convinced it could function like a stock. It’s more like a pistol brace,” Brooks said. “This arrest was not fair. It’s unusual. It seems like something that an officer would resort to if his intention was to make an arrest. I have never even heard of this. This gun was not altered in any way. It just has a different piece of plastic on back that can be removed without tools. I’ve probably sold more than 30,000 braced pistols over the years and this has never even come up.”

Brooks also took issue with the state charges.

“I wasn’t even aware of the Florida SBR statute until after all of this happened. The intent of the Florida law was likely to canonize the federal statute into state law, but they are a good three or four iterations behind federal law,” he said.

Reaction

Sarasota County (Florida) Sheriff Kurt Hoffman is also an attorney who served as general counsel for the department from 2005 until he became sheriff in 2021.

Hoffman believes that regardless of whether Smith had a legal AR pistol or an unlicensed SBR, the issue is whether his encounter with Pinellas Park police should have ended in arrest.

“When you have a citizen with no criminal history, who is not using firearms in an unlawful manner and you find what could be perhaps a technical violation, and it takes you three hours to determine whether you have a crime or not, perhaps the best thing to do is to take the offensive firearm part off the gun and then send the non-criminal on his way,” Sheriff Hoffman said. “I would like to think that law enforcement, when encountering someone who is not acting in a nefarious capacity, that we should not be going to the extreme. Certainly, the other firearms there were not illegal, so I don’t know what the intent was to seize them. Sometimes we’re our own worst enemy.”

Alan M. Gottlieb founded the Second Amendment Foundation more than 50 years ago and serves as its executive vice president.

Said Gottlieb: “This young man’s life as he knows it may be over. Even if he doesn’t serve a full 15 years in prison, he will become a convicted felon and unable to legally possess firearms, which he very clearly enjoys shooting. I was extremely surprised when I learned that this happened in Florida and not California, New York or New Jersey. Law enforcement needs to understand the harm that can come when they act so overzealously. By charging this young man with a second-degree felony they have ruined his life. That is the real crime here. I certainly hope there is a judge in Florida who sees it this way.”

 

The Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project wouldn’t be possible without you. Click here to make a tax deductible donation to support pro-gun stories like this.

This story is part of the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project and is published here with their permission.