What Happens When a County Employee Acts Like a Police Officer?

It's likely that a large chunk of the people reading this have had the unenviable experience of being pulled over by a police officer for a traffic infraction. You know what you're supposed to do. But what are you supposed to do when a government employee who is not a police officer pulls you over, detains you for hours, and tries to perform a traffic stop, despite having no authority to do so?

According to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit, you are, in some circumstances, supposed to accept this—as if working as, say, a highway engineer confers the monopoly on power held by the state. If government has one thing, it is the audacity.

This is not a hypothetical for Jonathan Large, one such engineer working for Mahnomen County, Minnesota. In 2017, he took umbrage with CSI, a road repair company, in a petty dispute that quickly escalated into much more.

The nitty-gritty details go something like this: The state of Minnesota hired CSI to execute some highway repairs, which required them to travel on specific roads to complete the assignment. Large, as the overseer of those haul roads, tried to stop the company from using them; the state ultimately gave CSI access to some, but not all, routes. As the project progressed, CSI requested access to another road, which they would travel on after emptying their load, thus mollifying any concerns about weight limits.