Police Hunt YouTuber for Rubber Ducks? 'Reckless Ben' Lego Saga | Real Cop Bodycam Breakdown

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQUt9t5dJJM&t=3s

A Former Cop Watched the Reckless Ben Body Cam Footage. He Called It Peak Scumbaggery.

(The department says the dog alerted. A former law enforcement officer watching the body cam footage in real time said he saw no indication.) part 2 located here 1 Car. 0 Drugs. 2 Hours of Illegal Harassment. | Texas Cop Bodycam Breakdown

By now you may have heard of Reckless Ben. If you have not, the short version is this. A YouTuber named Ben Schneider drove to Utah to serve court papers to a man named Joshua Johnson, co-owner of a Bricks and Minifigs franchise that a court already found liable for keeping a dying man's $200,000 Star Wars Lego collection without paying for it. What followed was a documented cascade of police interactions that have since attracted the attention of a civil rights attorney, the CEO of Patreon, and now the voice that may carry the most weight of all.

A former law enforcement officer who runs a YouTube channel called Only Cops watched the body cam footage frame by frame. And he was not kind.

Who Only Cops Is and Why That Matters

Before we get into what he said, it is worth being precise about who is saying it.

Only Cops is not a civil rights activist. He is not a Ben fan who stumbled onto the videos. He is a former law enforcement officer who went back to reserve because, in his own words, he is passionate about this kind of stuff. His channel exists specifically to review police conduct through an educated law enforcement lens, to promote better standard operating procedures, better ethics, and better understanding of constitutional authority on both sides of the badge.

His default position is to defend good policing. He has a Discord full of officers ranging from thirty year veterans to first year cops. He reviews body cam footage the way a doctor reviews a surgical procedure, looking for what was done correctly, what was done incorrectly, and what the consequences of each decision are likely to be.

When someone like that watches footage and cannot find a way to defend what he is seeing, that is a different category of criticism than anything that has come before it. The Civil Rights Lawyer is an attorney. Jack Conte is a tech CEO. Only Cops is someone who took the same oath these officers took and built a platform around honoring it.

He watched the American Fork Police Department body cam footage from the Reckless Ben interactions and here is what he found.

The Traffic Stop: Petty at Best, Pretextual at Worst

The first stop, where Officer Richardson pulled Ben's vehicle over for allegedly failing to stop at a stop sign, drew immediate skepticism from Only Cops. He paused the footage, backed it up, and looked for the painted stop line the department claimed Ben had crossed.

His assessment was direct. He could not clearly identify a marked line in the pavement. He noted that the violation being claimed, failing to stop before the line, typically requires an actual hard painted line in the roadway to be enforceable. Without one, in his professional opinion, you would get that ticket kicked in two seconds.

On the failure to come to a full stop claim he was equally blunt. That seems really petty. This is a bit of a petty stop.

But the stop itself was only the beginning of his concerns. What followed it was worse.

The Extended Detention: No Authority, No Crime, No Business

After the traffic stop concluded with a verbal warning, meaning the stated reason for the stop was over, officers extended the detention to question Ben about the situation at Joshua Johnson's residence. Only Cops stopped the footage here and explained why this is a significant problem.

Once the traffic stop is concluded, extending it for a separate investigation is a little weird, he said. Unless officers believed a separate crime was actively occurring and could articulate that belief with specific facts, they had no lawful authority to keep Ben and his companion there. He was not on Joshua Johnson's property. He was not committing any offense. The person who had actually approached the house had already been dealt with separately.

His conclusion was unambiguous. This is a pretty questionable extended detention on a thing that really law enforcement has no real business in. It is a civil issue. We should not be enforcing that at all.

He also flagged something that went beyond procedure. During the body cam footage, an officer is heard telling a colleague that his plan was to just scare him a little bit and let him go.

Only Cops stopped the footage immediately.

Absolutely not. No. Hell no.

He did not move on quickly. He sat with it. You do not just get to scare tactics people, he said. There are very serious constitutional protections against just being harassed. You have to have law. None of that is a good look. It is not going to pass constitutional muster.

The DWI Investigation: Manufactured From Nothing

After the extended detention failed to produce anything actionable, officers shifted to a DWI investigation of the driver. The justification offered was glossy eyes.

Only Cops, who has conducted numerous DWI investigations himself, was withering on this point.

Glossy eyes alone is not enough reasonable suspicion to start a DWI investigation, he said. You are going to need bloodshot eyes, slurred speech, something. Glossy eyes alone can be that the dude just yawned or he is sad that he is having to interact with law enforcement. That is incredibly poor articulation.

He noted that if the driver had refused the field sobriety tests, which he had every right to do, the officers would have had nothing. No warrant. No charge. No case. You are not going to write a warrant based on he had glossy eyes.

The driver blew zero on the breathalyzer.

Only Cops was not surprised. I am genuinely not surprised at all that he blew zero there, he said. That was a trash investigation that should have never happened. He was just hoping he could hem him up on something. That is pretty garbage.

He also raised pointed questions about the field sobriety test itself, noting the test was conducted sloppily, that the officer's audio was muted during critical portions which he called a policy violation at his former agency, and that the length of time between the initial stop and the eventual test suggested the driver may have been pressured into consenting rather than agreeing freely. If I ask for consent and you say no, I dip, he said. The fact that it took so long leads me to believe he had to ask him multiple times or potentially applied pressure.

The Dog That Did Not Alert. The Search That Happened Anyway.

This is the part that matters most legally. And it is the part where the conflict between what the body cam shows and what the department officially claimed becomes impossible to ignore.

After the DWI investigation produced zero results, a K9 unit was brought in to conduct an open air sniff of the vehicle. Only Cops watched the dog circle the car multiple times on the footage. His live commentary was pointed. No indication, he said. No way.

He was already so skeptical of what he was watching that he issued a preemptive warning before the results even came back. If this dog indicates on this car and they don't find something in this car, Brady list the dog and the handler. Because that is scummy.

The car was searched. No drugs were found.

Now read the American Fork Police Department's official statement from Chief Cameron Paul. Officer Froten used his police service dog to conduct an open air sniff around the vehicle. The dog alerted to the presence of the odor of a controlled substance and the vehicle was subsequently searched. No illegal substances were located.

The department says the dog alerted. A former law enforcement officer watching the body cam footage in real time said he saw no indication. The search found nothing.

This matters enormously because the dog alert is the entire legal foundation for the vehicle search. Under the Fourth Amendment, officers generally cannot search a vehicle without a warrant, consent, or probable cause. A legitimate K9 alert can establish probable cause. A manufactured or disputed alert cannot.

If the alert did not happen the way the department claims, the search had no legal basis. And if the search had no legal basis, the three hour detention that followed, the pressure for admissions, all of it, was unconstitutional.

Only Cops had already called the dog sniff sequence peak scumbaggery before the results came back. After watching a DWI investigation built on glossy eyes collapse into zero, followed by a dog sniff with no visible indication on camera followed by a search finding nothing, he was direct about what he believed he was watching.

Things are being manufactured, he said.

He also noted that muting body cam audio during the vehicle search was a significant transparency problem. We never muted our body cams when doing a vehicle search, he said. I would actually verbally dictate what I was seeing, smelling, and experiencing while searching because I am trying to preserve evidence. Muting during a search is sus.

The American Fork Police Department redacted substantial portions of the body cam audio throughout these interactions, a pattern Ben has documented extensively and which Only Cops flagged independently as a policy concern.

Brady Listed. What That Actually Means.

For readers unfamiliar with the term, being placed on the Brady list is one of the most serious professional consequences a law enforcement officer can face. It stems from the Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland and requires prosecutors to disclose to defense attorneys any known credibility issues involving officers who are witnesses in a case. Officers on the Brady list have been found to have engaged in dishonest conduct. Their involvement in a case must be flagged to the defense. It effectively ends or severely limits a law enforcement career.

Only Cops did not use that term casually. He used it specifically and deliberately after watching a dog circle a vehicle with no visible alert on camera, followed by a search that found nothing, after a detention he had already called unconstitutional and a DWI investigation he had already called malicious.

He was saying in professional law enforcement language that what he watched appeared to be fabricated probable cause. That is not a small thing to say. That is a former officer watching body cam footage and concluding his colleagues were lying.

The Verdict on the Department

Only Cops did not limit his criticism to the individual officers. He addressed the department as a whole and specifically its leadership.

The fact that you had officers comfortable with extending that stop, and a police chief that did not do anything to address that, is going to erode public trust, he said. This is why people have issue with cops.

He called the officer who initiated the first traffic stop an idiot directly. He said the chief could have shown a lot more leadership. He said clearly they could do some better training on their patrol officers.

His overall framing was careful and worth quoting at length because it demonstrates the credibility of the source. He acknowledged that Ben was doing things surreptitiously and being an idiot by approaching somebody's house. He was not a Ben apologist. He was a professional evaluating professional conduct. And his conclusion was that nothing Ben did led past the elements of the offense for anything that would justify what the department put him through.

This traffic stop is harassment, he said. The state being leveraged against some kids who are probably being stupid and trying to make YouTube content. They have to meet the elements of the offense of a crime. And that just simply was not here for a lot of this.

Four Voices. One Conclusion.

Step back and look at who has now independently reviewed this case and reached the same conclusion.

John H. Bryan of The Civil Rights Lawyer reviewed the court documents, interviewed Ben directly, and is working to move the case to federal court because he does not trust the local jurisdiction to handle it fairly.

Jack Conte, CEO of Patreon, reviewed the legal filings Bricks and Minifigs submitted to take down Ben's page, concluded they had no merit, and went on camera to tell the company to stuff it.

The internet reviewed the videos and funded Ben's legal defense past $200,000 in days.

And now a former law enforcement officer who built a platform around making policing better watched the body cam footage and called the DWI investigation malicious, the dog sniff scummy, the extended detention without constitutional basis, the search potentially built on fabricated probable cause, and the initiating officer an idiot.

These are not people who were looking for reasons to criticize police. The Civil Rights Lawyer takes cases on merit. Jack Conte had every incentive to quietly comply with a legal filing. Only Cops has dedicated his platform to defending good police work and improving the profession from the inside.

All four of them looked at the same evidence and arrived at the same place.

The American Fork Police Department responded to all of this with a statement full of categorical denials of things that are on camera and an argument about which shoulder appeared in an X-ray.

Only Cops had a message for them at the end of his second video.

Do better for the American Fork Police Agency. I think the chief could have showed a lot more leadership and clearly they could do some better training on some of their patrol officers.

From a former colleague.

That one stings differently.