A federal jury in San Antonio found Bexar County liable on September 28 for a traffic-stop program that began with a surveillance tip, not with anything the driver did on the road. The jury found that a sheriff’s deputy stopped, held and searched Houston-area driver Alek Schott without legal grounds, and that a county policy or custom drove each step. It awarded him $76, one dollar for every minute he was held on the shoulder of Interstate 35.
Schott sells equipment for his family’s oilfield business. On March 15, 2022, he was driving home from a well pad outside Carrizo Springs when Bexar County Deputy Joel Babb pulled over his Ford F-250, saying it had drifted across the fog line. Evidence at trial showed it had not, according to the Institute for Justice, which represented Schott. The tip came through a WhatsApp group chat called the “Northwest Highway Group,” from a man Babb knew only as “Kiki,” whom Babb testified he believed worked at a federal fusion center in Laredo. Schott was questioned in the front seat of a patrol car, and his truck was searched after a drug dog alerted. Deputies found nothing.
The verdict form, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, answers each question in the jury’s hand. A reasonable officer would not have suspected a traffic violation before the stop. The deputy extended the stop without reasonable suspicion of any crime. Deputies searched the truck without probable cause. For each, the jurors found that a Bexar County policy or custom was the moving force and that a county policymaker knew or should have known about it.
“Today a jury of Texans looked at how this program actually worked and said so,” said Christie Hebert, an attorney for the Institute for Justice. Schott said he filed a complaint with the sheriff’s office after the stop and was told to sue if he disagreed. “Today is vindication, not just for me, but for every driver they ran through this,” he said. The firm said it will ask the court to bar the county from using pretextual traffic stops as a route to warrantless searches.
Texas has already started pulling back from road surveillance on its own. On August 27, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state agencies to stop funding Flock license plate cameras. “To the extent that cities get any funding for those cameras, most of it comes from the federal government,” his spokesman, Andrew Mahaleris, told The Texas Tribune. A state authority had helped install at least 3,200 Flock cameras since 2023, the Tribune reported. In September, at Abbott’s direction, the Texas Department of Transportation stopped issuing permits for license plate readers along state roads.
The tip that put Schott on the shoulder came from a network Texas does not run. The jury that answered for it was made up of Texans, and Texas is now deciding for itself which cameras watch its roads.
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