The conference room smelled of old carpet and furniture polish. Porter assigned two investigators to video review, one to seizure files, and another to payroll, training, and budget records. A fifth investigator handled witness scheduling and evidence logs. They set up computers against one wall, stacked labeled boxes beneath a window, and wrote the date of every file transfer in a ledger that remained on the table throughout the operation.
Porter asked the sheriff's office for a full year of traffic-stop data associated with Hollister's interdiction unit. The first report listed three hundred forty stops, enough to make the review time-consuming but not unmanageable. She instructed the team to watch available recordings in full rather than rely on written narratives. Her experience had taught her that many details that mattered most appeared in the minutes before an officer claimed to discover probable cause.
The days became a blur of open doors, raised voices, hands placed on hoods, and drivers asking questions about searches. Some recordings showed routine stops handled professionally, which Porter made sure her team marked accurately. Others showed Hollister extending encounters long after the original traffic issue had been addressed. In several, a driver expressly refused consent while Hollister proceeded to search without clearly identifying a lawful justification.
Investigators built a spreadsheet covering time, location, reason for the stop, driver demographics where reliably available, search method, property taken, charge status, and recorded outcome. Porter insisted that figures be checked against dispatch entries and original video because a report written by a potentially compromised officer could not be treated as an independent source. When records were missing or incomplete, the team flagged them instead of quietly assuming what had happened. That caution would become important when the numbers were challenged later.
Of the three hundred forty stops in the reviewed year, two hundred sixty-one involved Black or Latino drivers. That represented approximately seventy-six point eight percent of the recorded encounters. Colter County's resident population was only about thirty-one percent Black or Latino, a contrast dramatic enough to raise concern, although the investigators knew local population figures alone could not describe the demographics of interstate traffic. They therefore sought additional traffic observations and regional comparison data before drawing formal conclusions about discriminatory enforcement.
The search figures were harder to explain away. Among seventy-nine stops involving white drivers, only three proceeded to a documented full vehicle search. Among two hundred sixty-one stops involving Black or Latino drivers, one hundred ninety-eight led to full vehicle searches. The contrast persisted after investigators separated stops by alleged offense, time of day, and whether drugs, weapons, or other evidence had actually been discovered.
Forty-three searches had produced cash seizures in that twelve-month period, totaling one hundred eighty-nine thousand dollars. The amount sounded impressive when presented at a budget meeting, but the underlying cases told a different story. None of those forty-three seizures was connected to a sustained drug or weapons conviction. Two motorists were charged with offenses that prosecutors later dismissed, while the others faced property claims despite the absence of criminal charges.