If I came down to your state, drove a licenced and registered car with all the stickers but without a drivers license, but stayed within the law as to not be checked by the police would you be OK with that?? What else do policehave to know I am licensed in some ways without checking?

Let me answer... A police officer can not tell if the driver of a vechicle has a valid drivers license unless he pulls the vehicle over and checks. Cetainly there are people driving on the road that do not have a drivers license yet it is still illegal for an officer to pull you over for no other reason than to check and see if you have a license to drive. None of you who support the idea of a wco checking your hunting license for no other reason than to see if you have one can explain why that is o.k. but it's not ok for a police officer to do the same regarding a drivers license. It's either proper for a state official to detain/question/search you without reasonable suspicion of wrong doing or it isn't. I say it's not proper regardless of the agency envolved or the legal activity the citizen is engaged in. When the founders wrote the 4th ammenment they didn't make any exceptions for hunting situations.

Actually, no I would not be OK with you driving with no licesne in my state as I would not be OK with you hunting my state without a license either.

I am saying a cophas allot of other things to check ID ofvehicles for legality andcan check who owns that vehicle, if its inspected, and if its registered/insured. They also have allot more opportunities to pull you over and check your drivers license.A warden has nothing to go on unless he sees youviolating a game law. In the woods thats pretty low as compared to the open road. He has no other checks to make to see if all else in on the up and up.There are also allot more cops, and theycan follow you around. Wardens have no advantage as that. I see cops every day on the road, I rarely see wardens in the woods.

I am sure we could go on the cop analogy all day.But I don't udnerstand why paying license holders do not want wardens checking for non paying hunters. Thats an invitation for poaching. Why should I, as an out of stater, pay 100+$ to huntPA when I can just doit for free??Especially when I know I won't get checked??Why bother getting a doe permit if he can't check tags?? These laws are there foryour benefit as honest paying hunters, not the wardens.

I don’t have any idea what occurred in your case but I do know that there are some really good reasons to check people with a video camera when it appears they may be part of a hunting situation, in season or out of season.

Every WCO out there has had illegal hunts videoed, including many out of season hunts. A few years back there were a couple of big name hunters caught doing just that here in various areas of the state and they had it all on video tape. Over the years I have seen a lot of illegal hunts, including the kills, put on video.

Perhaps when the Officers saw you with the camera it fit some other previous bit of information they had and they felt a need to confirm what you were or weren’t doing. Or, perhaps this was during that same time period we were looking for the guys that we knew were filming illegal hunts.

Incidentally it would have been illegal for you to have had grandma’s license or anyone else’s license with you in the field that day even if you didn’t have a gun. I’m not saying you would have been cited if you had grandma’s license and wasn’t hunting but you certainly could be.

Dick Bodenhorn
WCO, Elk County

So you are avoiding the point. The cop has no way of knowing whether or not the driver of the vehicle has a legitamate drivers license sofrom what you have saidI can only conclude that you support the idea that it's just fine for a police officer to stop you in order to acertain whether or not you possess a valid drivers license. How about if a cop can't be sure you are not making methanphetamine in your basement and decides on his own to checkthat out too. Using the same logic I guess that's o.k. too. Here's something that Paul Revere said with regard to thosewhowere too spineless to resist government edicts. "When the king's agent tells you to kiss his a$$, will you do it?"

Some of you just don’t get it. Once again I will explain that the courts have ruled that checking a hunter for a hunting license is not an unreasonable search. It isn’t that the topic has never been challenged in court, it has been. The courts have looked at the entire practice of checking hunting and fishing license and said that it is an entirely legal as well as an accepted and expected practice.

Now let’s once again take a look at what hunters could do if we didn’t check hunting license.

First off there would be no need to buy a license any more since some people have started making counterfeit license. The only way to detect that is to know what to closely look for and check the license by having it in hand.

There wouldn’t be any need to anyone to get an archery or muzzleloader license any more, at least until after you had already killed a deer and were worried about the Game Warden finding out about the kill. After all we would never be able to tell if the stamp was on the license or if it was real since we couldn’t check the license.

We would only need one license for the entire family to hunt unless more then one person was going to hunt at the same time. How would the Game Warden ever know who the license was issued to since he can’t check it?

Or, perhaps we could just get a license for everyone in the family and since they each come with a tag we could kill our buck today and grandma’s buck tomorrow and then start to hunt for one to dead Uncle Tom’s tag on. After all the Game Warden would never catch us, at least until after the deer are dead, since he can’t check our license.

But, then on the other hand why get extra license to kill more deer since all we would have to do is just keep erasing the information on the deer tag and taping it back in the license. Since the Game Warden can’t check the license there is absolutely no way he would ever detect that the tag had been used over and over again.

Talk about having no idea how many deer were being killed. If we couldn’t check license there would be almost no control over how many deer were being killed illegally. Checking the license is the first step in having even a reasonable degree of compliance with the legal harvesting of wildlife.

As far as the topic of warrant less searches of vehicles, homes or camps those things do not happen anymore and haven’t happened for a long time unless the person in control of the property gave consent to the search without a warrant.

Dick Bodenhorn
WCO, Elk County

All a Cop has to do, or for that matter all I have to do to find out if you have a drivers license in this state, is call in your vehicle registration which takes about a minute to get a response as to who owns the vehicle along with their address. Then with that information they can query everyone at that address to find out whom all has a driver’s license and if anyone is on suspension of their driving privileges.

All of that takes about two to four minute so they still have lots of time to pull you over. The State police can do all of that directly from their car computer (premier) system in minutes.

At this point that can’t be done with a hunting license. The only way to check a hunting license in this state is to take the license from the holder and physically examine it. If hunters are willing to fund the cost of the computerized systems we can probably get to where we can check to see if you are properly licensed as a hunter just about as easily. Though that still wouldn’t solve some of the other problems that would still require a license check it probably would cut down on a lot of license checks.

If you don’t think the police can and do conduct quite driver’s license check you are both very naïve and very mistaken. It happens all the time when they feel they have the need to know, they just don’t need to deal with you to get the information they needed to know about you.

Dick Bodenhorn
WCO, Elk County

RSB said:

"There wouldn’t be any need to anyone to get an archery or muzzleloader license any more, at least until after you had already killed a deer and were worried about the Game Warden finding out about the kill. After all we would never be able to tell if the stamp was on the license or if it was real since we couldn’t check the license.

We would only need one license for the entire family to hunt unless more then one person was going to hunt at the same time. How would the Game Warden ever know who the license was issued to since he can’t check it?

Or, perhaps we could just get a license for everyone in the family and since they each come with a tag we could kill our buck today and grandma’s buck tomorrow and then start to hunt for one to dead Uncle Tom’s tag on. After all the Game Warden would never catch us, at least until after the deer are dead, since he can’t check our license.

But, then on the other hand why get extra license to kill more deer since all we would have to do is just keep erasing the information on the deer tag and taping it back in the license. Since the Game Warden can’t check the license there is absolutely no way he would ever detect that the tag had been used over and over again."

Talk about having no idea how many deer were being killed. If we couldn’t check license there would be almost no control over how many deer were being killed illegally. Checking the license is the first step in having even a reasonable degree of compliance with the legal harvesting of wildlife."

You know Dick, all of the things you've mentioned above seem to fit the profile of how Don Madl acted when he and his family members killed all those deer. Perhaps your fellow Game Wardens , Managers and Supervisors should have employed those tactics in dealing with Madl. It certainly would have set an example.Your colleagues seemed to have given Madl a FreePass but vigoriously applied the law tous "radicals and anarchists."

I don't understand why you just don't shoot us on sight.

As someone else previously said, "your credibility is shot."

I think my credibility is just fine though I also think it is getting easier all the time to find which ones fit the profile of the radicals.

If you think those issues have no credence or I no credibility then how about explaining how the system would or could work without those present safeguards.

We have been over the Madl issue time and again. If you are so hung up on ancient history then you should just call the Attorney Generals Office and straighten them out since they handled that investigation.

What Madl did or didn’t do has absolutely no bearing on hunter license checks, the integrity of the officers or the agency and you know it. You seem to just be popping some smoke to hide behind; an old habit I could almost forgive you for I suppose. What smoke was your favorite color?

Dick Bodenhorn
WCO, Elk County

Quote:

ORIGINAL: R.S.B.

All a Cop has to do, or for that matter all I have to do to find out if you have a drivers license in this state, is call in your vehicle registration which takes about a minute to get a response as to who owns the vehicle along with their address. Then with that information they can query everyone at that address to find out whom all has a driver’s license and if anyone is on suspension of their driving privileges...

So whenI drive my mother's car which has not been reported stolen, the police can know all about me by running a tag check? Give me a break!

You are still avoiding the point: we know it is still legal; we admitthat some good can come of it, but feel that on balance it iswrong and hurts the PGC, which is hemorrhaging hunters,more than it helps.

BTW, since you smeared posters here with a prettybroad and black brush, it's only fair that you let me know if youwere talking about me.

Do you consider me to be a radical and/or anarchist? Do you think I have a criminal history? Are you claiming that I was ever banned from a website?

They only way you'd ever get the truth is to have hired an attorney, sued them and asked that question in discovery where the WCO's would have to answer under oath andexplain everythingthat influenced them. That's also the only way you'd ever find out if the stop was legal or not.
Just because there might be a situation where such a stop would be lawful does not mean that it always is. These things are decided case by case.
I am assuming that you are not made out of money so I guess you'll never know.