Assignment task: You are giving a workshop at a police academy. Your goal is to help officers in training understand how to ask for consent to search without coercion.
At the end of your workshop, you provide a test for the officers with the following four examples. You ask the officers to identify the least coercive utterance and then to explain why the other examples are problematic. Make an answer key for your test. It should identify which utterance is least coercive, and it should explain what is problematic about each of the others.
- Would you mind if we search your vehicle?
- Do I have your consent to search your car?
- You don't mind if I search your car?
- You don't mind if I look around the car, do you?