Matt peppered the FBI agents with questions during that first meeting, but he didn’t receive many answers. The agents would confirm only that there was a dashcam video of the incident. Both Matt and Stacy immediately wondered what it would show. More importantly, if there was no warrant associated with Bryce or his car, why was he stopped in the first place? By Wednesday morning, Independence police released Officer Runnels’ search warrant application, and the probable cause appeared to have changed. Runnels wrote that he “observed the vehicle to have darkly tinted windows,” and that after Bryce partially rolled down his window, he “detected an odor of marijuana coming from inside the vehicle.” Runnels maintained that there was a warrant associated with the license plate, but FBI agents told Matt that the plate number would have provided details for a woman, with a different car, from a different county.
Matt called the FBI agents he met on Monday. “You see what’s happening here,” Matt told them. “They’re working it backwards.” Matt’s experience as a cop taught him that officers can sometimes write themselves out of trouble through exaggerated and self-serving reports. “Whenever you see these officers come out with a use of force, whether it be a shooting or a tasering or a whatever, there are phrases that always go in those reports, that we’ve been trained to put in there,” Matt said. “And so many times that’s just like an ‘insert quote here’ in your report because that’s going to cover your ass.”
Matt saw the phrasing and knew Runnels was looking for ways to justify both the stop and the attempted arrest. Matt suspected that once it was clear the warrant association to the car wasn’t sufficient probable cause for an arrest, Runnels needed new justifications. Since smell is subjective, and difficult to prove, officers can use “marijuana odor” broadly to justify probable cause, Matt said. “Cops use that all the time.”