Ask Deandra: What Should I Do If I’m Pulled Over and the Officer Thinks I’m Drunk?

Here is the longer answer: what the officer is doing, what your obligations actually are, and what every Texas driver should know before the stop ever happens.

What the Officer Is Doing

From the moment the lights come on, the officer is building a case. Every observation, every word you say, every movement you make is being noted, and in most stops it is being recorded on a body-worn camera and an in-car camera. The officer is looking for facts to support reasonable suspicion that you committed a traffic offense, probable cause to investigate further, and ultimately probable cause to arrest you for driving while intoxicated.

The officer is trained to look for specific signs: bloodshot eyes, slurred speech, the odor of alcohol, fumbling for documents, statements that suggest recent drinking. Some of these signs are real. Many of them have innocent explanations such as fatigue, allergies, contact lenses, illness, anxiety or a recent meal. The officer’s job in the moment is not to evaluate the innocent explanations. The officer’s job is to gather evidence.

Knowing this changes how you handle the stop. You are not in a conversation. You are in an evidence-gathering encounter. Treat it that way.

Pull Over Safely

When you see lights behind you, signal, slow down, and pull over to the right shoulder as soon as it is safe. If you are on a highway and the right shoulder is unsafe, take the next exit or pull into a well-lit lot. Use your turn signal. Do not slam on the brakes, do not swerve, and do not stop in the middle of a lane of traffic.

How you pull over is the first piece of evidence the officer collects. A smooth, controlled stop in a reasonable and safe location helps you. An erratic, delayed, or panicked stop hurts you. Officers note these things in the offense report and they are often visible on dashcam video that the defense will eventually request.

You can also record. In Texas you may record your own traffic stop. The federal appeals court that covers Texas has held there is a First Amendment right to record the police, subject to reasonable limits, and Texas law lets you record a conversation you are part of. Do it openly rather than secretly. Say that you are recording, keep your hands visible, set the phone somewhere it cannot be mistaken for anything else, and do not physically interfere with what the officer is doing. The right protects recording, not obstructing. In practice, the video you make is sometimes the only copy that survives.

What You Have to Provide

Texas law requires you to have your driver’s license with you and display it when a peace officer asks, and to show evidence of insurance on request. A photo of your insurance card on your phone counts. Hand both over, calmly.

Three things are worth knowing about how narrow those duties actually are, because a lot of what people believe here is wrong.

• There is no Texas law requiring you to produce a registration receipt. Your registration is proved by your sticker and your plates, not by a piece of paper you hand across. Officers commonly ask for it and there is no harm in providing it if you have it handy, but you are not breaking a law if you cannot find it.
• Not having proof of insurance is a fine-only offense, and it is curable. If you cannot produce it at the roadside, you can clear the charge by showing the court that you had valid coverage at the time. Worth knowing before you panic and start explaining.
• Refusing to give your name is only a crime after you have been arrested. If you are merely detained, what is illegal is lying about who you are, not staying quiet. There is one exception drivers should know, added in 2023: if you are pulled over, you fail to provide your license, and you then refuse to give your name, license number, address or date of birth, that combination is a Class C misdemeanor, and a Class B if you give a false name.

So the practical rule is simple. Give your name. Hand over your license and your insurance. Never lie about any of it. Nothing beyond that is required of you.

Do it calmly and keep your hands visible. If you need to reach into the glove box or center console, tell the officer what you’re doing before you do it: “My insurance card is in the glove box. May I reach for it?” This is basic safety for both of you, and it eliminates a category of misunderstanding that escalates traffic stops unnecessarily.

What You Don’t Have to Provide

Beyond identification and the required documents, you do not have to volunteer information. Specifically, you do not have to:

• Answer questions about whether you’ve been drinking. Polite, accurate refusal: “Officer, I’d prefer not to answer questions without a lawyer.” Or simply, “I’d rather not say.” You are not required to admit to anything, and the officer’s assurance that “honesty will help you” is not a guarantee. It is an interrogation technique.
• Answer questions about where you’ve been or where you’re going. These questions are not casual conversation. They are designed to elicit admissions about timing, location, and consumption that will appear in the offense report and on video.
• Answer questions about how much you’ve had to drink. “I had a couple of beers” and “I had two glasses of wine with dinner” are the two most common admissions in Texas DWI cases. They are also the two admissions that show up most often in trial transcripts.
• Perform field sobriety tests. Standardized Field Sobriety Tests (the walk-and-turn, the one-leg stand, and the horizontal gaze nystagmus test) are voluntary in Texas. No law requires you to do them, and the officer is not going to tell you that. Polite refusal: “Officer, I respectfully decline.” Understand the trade-off before you decide, because almost nobody explains it. If you refuse, the prosecutor is allowed to tell the jury you refused. Texas courts treat these tests as physical rather than testimonial, so declining is not taking the Fifth and the refusal comes into evidence. That is still not a reason to perform them. Plenty of sober people fail these tests, they are graded on criteria you have never seen, and a video of you failing is far worse evidence than one sentence about a refusal. But make the choice knowing what the choice is.
• Submit to a roadside portable breath test. A roadside PBT is not the same as the instrument used at the station. The test is voluntary and you do not have to blow into one. It is also worth knowing that the number it produces will never be shown to a jury: Texas courts hold those results are not reliable enough to be admitted, though an officer can still use the reading as one factor supporting probable cause to arrest you. It is a screening tool that helps the officer decide, not evidence that helps the State prove. Do not confuse it with the station test, which is an entirely separate decision with real consequences.

Knowing your rights is one thing. Exercising them politely and calmly is another. Both matter.

How to Decline Without Escalating

The most common mistake people make at a DWI stop is escalating the encounter when they refuse. You do not have to argue. You do not have to explain. You do not have to convince the officer that they’re wrong. You can decline politely and consistently:

• “Officer, I’d prefer not to answer questions without a lawyer.”
• “I respectfully decline to perform any tests.”
• “Am I free to leave?”
• “Am I being detained?”

Say it out loud. This matters more than it sounds like it should. Simply going quiet is not the same as invoking your rights. The Supreme Court has held that silence you never label as an invocation is just silence, and a prosecutor may argue to a jury that an innocent person would have answered the question. The words are what turn the same conduct into a constitutional claim. So do not just stop talking. Say that you are declining to answer without a lawyer, and then stop talking.

There is also a reason to ask whether you are free to leave, beyond wanting to know. An officer may stop you for a traffic violation, but the stop cannot be stretched out indefinitely. Once the tasks tied to the traffic offense are done, or reasonably should have been done, the authority to hold you ends unless the officer has developed genuine suspicion of something else in the meantime. That is why the timeline matters so much later. In a great many DWI cases the whole fight is over the exact minute the officer stopped writing a ticket and started investigating intoxication, and your question on the video is what marks it.

If the officer says you are free to leave, leave. Calmly, courteously, without further conversation. If the officer says you are being detained, you do not have to answer questions but you should comply with lawful commands (step out of the vehicle, stand here, place your hands on the car). You can comply without speaking, and you can decline to perform tests without resisting.

Politeness is not weakness. A defendant who handled the stop calmly, declined tests respectfully, and provided only what the law required is a defendant whose video looks good in front of a jury. A defendant who argued, shouted, or tried to talk their way out of the situation is a defendant whose video does not.

If the Officer Asks You to Step Out of the Vehicle

Under Pennsylvania v. Mimms, 434 U.S. 106 (1977), an officer can lawfully order you out of the vehicle during a traffic stop, and does not need any additional reason to do it. The same goes for your passengers. Comply. Stepping out is not the same as consenting to tests, answering questions, or admitting anything. Step out, follow lawful commands, and continue to decline questions and tests politely. Refusing does not preserve any argument for later, and it can support a separate charge.

Once you are out of the car, the officer may ask you to perform field sobriety tests. As above, these are voluntary. Decline politely and consistently. The officer may then move to other investigative steps, including visual observation, more conversation, and a request for the roadside breath test, each of which you can decline. At some point the officer will either let you go or arrest you.

If You Are Arrested

If the officer decides to arrest you, you will be placed in handcuffs, transported to the station, and the formal DWI investigation will continue under different rules. At the station:

• You will be given the DIC-24 statutory warning. The law requires it to be read aloud and handed to you in writing, both. It is the warning that has to come before the officer asks for a breath or blood specimen, and it sets out what happens if you refuse and what happens if you agree. Listen even if you do not follow every word and keep the paper.
• You will be asked to provide a breath or blood sample. This is a separate decision from anything that happened at the roadside, and it is the decision with the most consequences attached. It is covered in detail in our breath-test refusal post, and the science behind it in our posts on the breath test and the blood test.
• You should ask to speak with an attorney. Texas does not give you a categorical right to talk to a lawyer before the breath or blood decision, so the officer does not have to wait. Ask anyway, for two reasons. Some officers allow it. And your request for a lawyer cannot be used against you at trial, which is not true of much else that happens in that room: your refusal of the test itself can be shown to the jury, but your asking for counsel cannot.
• You should still decline to answer substantive questions. Anything you say at the station can be used against you. Provide your name and identifying information. Decline questions about drinking, driving, and where you’ve been until you have a lawyer.
• A clock starts on your license the moment you are served with the suspension notice. It is short. You have fifteen days from the date of service to request a hearing, and if you miss it the suspension takes effect by default. That deadline runs on its own track, separate from the criminal case, and it does not wait for you to decide how you feel about the charge. Start at our page on your license after a DWI arrest.

After the Stop, Whether or Not You Are Arrested

If you are released without arrest, write down everything you can remember while it is fresh: time, location, the officer’s name, what was said, what tests were requested, what you declined. If you are arrested and released later, do the same as soon as possible. Memory fades, and contemporaneous notes are often the foundation of a good defense.

Ask for the video, in writing, quickly. If you were stopped or arrested for DWI, Texas law entitles you to a copy of any video the officer made of the stop, the arrest, your field sobriety tests, and any breath or blood draw. Two things that law does not do, though, and both matter. It does not require the agency to record you in the first place. And it sets no retention period, so how long footage survives is a matter of agency policy. That is why a written preservation request in the first days of a case is not a formality.

Whether arrested or released, the next step is the same: call a DWI defense lawyer with forensic training. The attorney can request video and reports while they still exist, evaluate the administrative license consequences, look at whether the stop itself was lawful, and start building the file before the State does.

Things You Should Never Do at a DWI Stop

A short list of mistakes that turn defensible cases into harder ones:

• Do not lie. If you are not going to answer, do not answer. But never give the officer a false statement. This is the one place where silence and lying are treated very differently: staying quiet during a detention is not a crime, and giving a false name is. False statements come back to harm you in ways that simple silence does not.
• Do not argue. The roadside is not the venue. Save the argument for your lawyer in a courtroom.
• Do not drive away, and do not run. If you flee in the car, a misdemeanor stop becomes a felony. If you run on foot, it is a Class A misdemeanor, which is not a felony but still carries more punishment than the DWI you were stopped for. Either way you have handed the officer probable cause for everything that follows and given the prosecutor a story to tell.
• Do not consent to a vehicle search. If asked, decline politely: “Officer, I do not consent to a search of my vehicle.” The officer may search anyway under an exception to the warrant requirement, but say it regardless. Refusing costs you nothing, because in Texas your refusal is not admissible as evidence of guilt, and it forces the State to justify the search on a recognized exception rather than resting on your permission, which is a much heavier burden for them. Say it once, calmly, and do not physically resist.
• Do not post about it on social media. Before, during, or after. Prosecutors and investigators check.
• Do not call the officer back later to apologize or explain. Anything you say in that follow-up call can be used against you.

For more on what comes next, read our step-by-step guide to what to do after a DWI arrest in Texas, and our overview of Texas DWI stops and arrests.

The Bottom Line

A DWI stop is a high-stakes, evidence-gathering encounter that the officer has trained for and you have not. The best preparation is to know your rights before the lights ever come on. Pull over safely. Be polite. Provide your license and insurance. Decline questions and voluntary tests respectfully, and say that you are declining rather than just going quiet. If arrested, ask for a lawyer and stop talking. The roadside is not where DWI cases are won, but it is absolutely where they are lost. A handful of careful choices at the side of the road can make the difference between a case your lawyer can fight and a case the State delivers gift-wrapped.

DWI Defense at Deandra Grant Law

Deandra Grant Law defends DWI and intoxication-offense cases across North and Central Texas including Dallas, Fort Worth, Plano, McKinney, Frisco, Allen, Lewisville, Denton, Rockwall, and Waco. We review every traffic stop video, every offense report, and every warrant affidavit for the issues that determine whether the State’s case stands up, and we handle first offenses and repeat cases alike.

If you have been pulled over for DWI in Texas, call Deandra Grant Law at (214) 225-7117 to schedule a confidential consultation. And remember that the 15-day ALR deadline runs from the date of service of the notice of suspension.

Have a DWI question you want answered in this series? Submit it at texasdwisite.com. You might see it featured in a future Ask Deandra post.