‘We Didn’t Do This Perfectly’: American Fork Police Chief’s Understatement Now Anchors A Civil Rights Lawsuit By Reckless Ben’s Helpers

We’ve been covering a bunch of stories related to the saga of “Reckless” Ben Schneider and Bricks & Minifigs (“BAM”), which began with a series of videos Schneider produced about his increasingly more extreme attempts to get back the Lego sets that someone had given to a BAM franchise on a consignment deal, and which it seems quite clear, BAM corporate illegally held onto after taking back that franchise. BAM settled and claims it gave back the remaining sets to the original owner, Bryan Mansell, but Mansell says he got back about 35 sets out of hundreds, some of which weren’t even his — not exactly what he was expecting.

But if you’ll recall, in those original videos, at one point there was a bizarre scene where the American Fork Police Department had a SWAT team (or equivalent) raid the AirBNB where Ben and some of the people helping him were staying, arresting all of them.

There were a number of other sketchy moves by the American Fork Police Department, including pulling over the car Ben was a passenger in on totally pretextual claims, accusing another of Ben’s colleagues of trespassing on a property she hadn’t been on, and then arresting another colleague for pressing the power button to lock his phone after being ordered to hand it over.

Soon after this, prosecutors charged Schneider with misdemeanor stalking charges and (even more bizarrely) “targeted residential picketing.” That case is still ongoing, though a scheduled hearing last month was recently postponed until December, apparently to give the two sides a chance to come to a “potential resolution.”

The American Fork police responded to the original coverage with one of the most bizarre videos I’ve ever seen: a 26-minute production featuring the police chief standing in what appears to be a white void, doing a weird ASMR defense of his police force. Later on the bodycam footage from the American Fork Police Department leaked, which poked massive holes in the AFPD’s claims.

Independent journalist Daniel Sroka then sat down with that same police chief, Cameron Paul, and American Fork Mayor Brad Frost in August, and then with Paul alone again in September. Sroka recorded both meetings, and got Paul to admit that he made mistakes in what he said in that video. But he also seems to have admitted to a lot of unconstitutional mistakes made by the police force he oversees.

All of that has now resulted in four of Ben’s colleagues (but not Ben himself) suing American Fork and 13 of its police officers in federal court for violating their First and Fourth Amendment rights. The full 52-page complaint is worth reading (though, bizarrely, I’ve seen six separate news articles on this lawsuit and not a single one includes the complaint!).

In short, it seems quite clear that (as many people suspected upfront) the AFPD cut all kinds of corners, abused their powers, and violated the rights of a group of young adults in the false belief that the local residents (connected to BAM) must be correct, and the “kids” were causing trouble. There seemed to be a pervasive belief among the AFPD that they could effectively scare the young people straight by detaining and threatening them, which is not how policing is supposed to work.

From the complaint:

Plaintiffs were helping an investigative journalist and YouTuber, Benjamin Schneider, document and pursue a civil dispute over an Oregon family’s LEGO collection. Plaintiffs tried to serve court papers, drove a car, filmed, raised money on GoFundMe, and hung a sign on a neighbor’s fence with the neighbor’s permission. That is lawful, constitutionally protected activity.

In response, AFPD officers stopped Plaintiff Tyler Shaw for a stop-sign violation that AFPD’s own Chief of Police now admits never happened; held Mr. Shaw for roughly two hours, ran him through field sobriety tests, and brought a drug dog to his car after he blew a .000 on a breath test, while the officer in charge, explained: “I was gonna scare him a little bit and let him go”; ripped Plaintiff Sheldon Norcross’s phone from his hand and arrested him because, in the officer’s own words, Mr. Norcross invoked his right to remain silent; and then obtained a search warrant for “stolen . . . Lego merchandise” on a sworn affidavit that the Chief now calls “one of the biggest places where we screwed up,” and used it to storm a basement rental with guns drawn including a rifle, handcuff every occupant—including a 16-year-old—and haul them all to the police station.

The Chief of Police, Cameron Paul, initially defended all of this in a 26-minute YouTube video. After an outside review, he conceded in a recorded meeting that “we didn’t do this perfectly,” that “several issues . . . weren’t handled well, or were handled outside of policy,” that “it was clearly not a stop sign violation,” that the reasons written for seizing Mr. Norcross’s phone “would not be a justification for seizing the phone,” that “[t]his didn’t really have anything to do with Legos. We weren’t going in to look for Legos. We didn’t even search the residence for Legos,” that the affidavit “did not get reviewed by a supervisor” despite “a clear directive and policy” requiring it, and that what the officers “would have needed to have . . . is individualized, probable cause for all five individuals.”

Those admissions confirm what the body-worn camera footage, dash camera footage, and AFPD’s own reports show: the individual Defendants violated Plaintiffs’ clearly established First and Fourth Amendment rights, and they did so because the City of American Fork staffed its patrol division with inexperienced officers, failed to train them on the constitutional limits that govern traffic stops, phone seizures, warrant affidavits, and warrant execution, and failed to enforce even the safeguards its own written policies require.

I guess kudos to police chief Paul for effectively admitting to much of this in the interviews with Sroka. That certainly makes life easier for those whose rights were violated by the AFPD.

The details Paul admitted to are pretty damning. On AFPD pulling over Shaw’s vehicle (with Schneider as a passenger):

Officer Richardson then stopped Mr. Shaw’s car, claiming he “observed the vehicle fail to stop before the stop line at a stop sign, as well as failure to come to a complete stop.”

That was false. Mr. Shaw stopped properly at the stop sign. There was no traffic violation and no other lawful basis to stop the car.

AFPD’s Chief of Police agrees. After reviewing the footage, Chief Paul stated of Officer Richardson: “I understand that he thought he knew what the statute said, but he didn’t”; “It’s hard to justify any type of a stop sign violation here”; “I do not believe there was a stop sign violation”; and “he clearly misremembered, and it was clearly not a stop sign violation.” Chief Paul further stated that AFPD has “since gone over the statute with him.”

Chief Paul contends that Officer Richardson had reasonable suspicion for some other reason, which Plaintiffs deny, but he acknowledged that Officer Richardson “should have based his stop on that reasonable suspicion to begin with and not try to have drummed up some kind of other offense.” The only basis Officer Richardson ever gave for the stop was a traffic violation that did not occur

Also, I hadn’t realized from the videos that police stopped Shaw a second time, the very next day. That’s the stop where they held him for two hours, and where the bodycam caught officers admitting they wanted to scare him. Knowing these were two separate stops on consecutive days makes it look even more like deliberate intimidation.

On the evening of March 9, 2026, Mr. Shaw was again driving his car with Mr. Schneider as a passenger. Mr. Shaw stopped to pick up an acquaintance, Christian Morgan, who had been dropped off near Mr. Johnson’s residence.

Officer Hawkins had just told Mr. Morgan he was “trespassed” from Mr. Johnson’s property. Mr. Morgan had left the property as instructed. Officer Hawkins then saw Mr. Morgan “attempt to get into” Mr. Shaw’s car, activated his emergency lights, and stopped Mr. Shaw’s car.

Officer Hawkins did not tell Mr. Shaw why he was stopped, there being no lawful reason for the stop. Walking toward a car after leaving a property when told to leave is not a crime, and Mr. Shaw had committed no traffic violation.

Officer Hawkins opened by demanding: “I’ll ask again because I wasn’t born yesterday. Why are we harassing people?”

Instead of addressing any traffic matter, Officer Hawkins accused Mr. Shaw and Mr. Schneider of “harass[ing]” Mr. Johnson. He then had Officer Fraughton look at Mr. Shaw’s eyes, and the two officers claimed that Mr. Shaw’s eyes “were glossy and seemed to have a red layer of tint in them.”

That claim was false, and the officers knew it was false. Officer Hawkins’ in-car camera recorded him explaining the stop to another officer in his patrol car before the sobriety tests began. He said he had stopped the car because “I watch them try to get in this car,” and that “[t]he main reason was I smelled alcohol on the other guy’s breath. So I was hoping he just got caught.” Asked whether “these guys” were good “to drive,” the answer recorded was: “Yeah, I think so. I didn’t see anything clear as day with Tyler that I noticed.”

Officer Hawkins then described his plan in his own words: “I was gonna scare him a little bit and let him go.” When the other officer asked, “do we have . . . charges or are we just tired of them being annoying?”, Officer Hawkins answered that he would “try to link it to” Mr. Schneider: “So if I can get Ben to say, yeah, well, I did tell him to go over there and do that, then I have harassment charges on [him]. . . . I don’t care that much, it’s more of just the fact that they’re trying to be sneaky.” He added, “we don’t really have a harassment code in Utah.”

Officer Hawkins therefore knew, before he ever removed Mr. Shaw from the car, that he had no reasonable suspicion that Mr. Shaw was impaired or had committed any crime. He prolonged the stop anyway: to “scare him a little bit,” and to try to build a case against Mr. Schneider.

Scaring someone is not a lawful basis to stop him or to prolong a stop.

There’s also this:

Officer Hawkins’ report on the sobriety tests twice refers to the subject of the testing as “Johnny,” a person who was not present, indicating that the narrative was likely copied from another report rather than written from what Officer Hawkins observed of Mr. Shaw.

Yeah, apparently the AFPD officers who held Shaw and Schneider for hours had so little evidence that they copy and pasted the report on the field sobriety test of someone totally different.

Again, the Sroka interview gets AFPD’s chief to admit that the two hours of detention on zero basis is, as you probably already know, not actually allowed:

Chief Paul has acknowledged each of the governing rules the officers ignored: “I can’t prolong a stop just for a canine sniff unless I have something more”; “We can’t extend the time of a stop beyond what we would normally spend just to be able to deploy a dog”; and, as to the officers’ claim that a different person smelled of alcohol, “it wouldn’t give articulable suspicion . . . . It’s got to be individualized just because someone else has the odor of an alcoholic beverage on their breath [it] doesn’t justify it.”

Chief Paul’s attempted defense — that the sniff “was done . . . at the same time they were doing field sobriety tests” — is contradicted by Officer Hawkins’ own report, which shows that the dog was summoned only after the tests were finished and Mr. Shaw had blown .000.

When shown AFPD’s written canine policy, Chief Paul did not dispute that it contains no statement that a stop may not be extended for a canine sniff absent independent reasonable suspicion, responding that “[w]e clearly don’t have every single piece of . . . precedent in department policy.” He has also defended “scar[ing]” citizens as an accepted AFPD practice: “There are times we will do that where we’ll go out and we’ll help somebody understand the gravity of the situation and make it appear very serious to them or as serious as it is. And then we will use our discretion and cut them loose.”

Then there’s the story of Sierra Lauts, the woman Schneider had asked to be the process server for his attempted lawsuit against one of the guys who took over the franchise, Josh Johnson. As shown in Ben’s original video, she was seated in a car waiting outside of Johnson’s property for him to leave the house. She never entered his property. And the police took the papers from her, showed them to Johnson but did not complete the service, saying he refused them (which is not how any of this works). And then they “trespassed” Lauts, which is kinda crazy given that she was never on Johnson’s property.

Officers Sumbot and Somerville, among others, arrived, approached Ms. Lauts’s car, demanded her identification and address, and questioned her about why she was there and whether she was a “legal” process server. Ms. Lauts answered truthfully and provided her driver’s license. She was not free to leave. Officer Somerville stayed posted at the car, explaining: “We just try to have at least one officer to kind of stick around with every group,” because “you never know when people are going to try and . . . take off.” He was present when the occupants were told that Mr. Johnson “wanted you trespassed.”

Mr. Johnson told the officers the court papers were fake and that Ms. Lauts was a fake process server, and he asked that she be arrested for “impersonating a process server.” Officer Sumbot then called the Marion County Circuit Court, which confirmed that the case was real, that it had been filed, and that Mr. Johnson still needed to be served.

Even with the court’s confirmation in hand, the officers continued to treat lawful service of process as criminal conduct. Officer Sumbot carried the papers to Mr. Johnson’s door but did not deliver them, and Mr. Johnson was allowed to refuse them.

The officers then discussed among themselves, on camera, whether to have Ms. Lauts “trespassed” from a property she had never entered: “I’m just gonna see if he wants the girl trespassed.” An officer then asked Mr. Johnson, “So what do you want done today, do you want her trespassed?” Mr. Johnson replied: “no, I want them for stalking.”

Officer Sumbot then told Ms. Lauts that Mr. Johnson “wanted her trespassed from the property and not to return,” and Ms. Lauts was formally trespassed even though she remained in her car on a public street the entire time

This section concludes with the understatement of the year:

Chief Paul has since conceded that “even between officers, there’s some confusion on what can be done? What can’t be done? What needs to be done? What should be done?” when it comes to civil process, and that “it’s pretty apparent that we need to make sure we’re doing some additional training.”

Ya think?

Then there’s the seizing of Sheldon Norcross’s phone, which is also covered in detail in Schneider’s video. The complaint explains how ridiculous that all was, with the cops literally making up reasons on the spot for why they could seize the phone, claiming they could just take it because Norcross initially told them he wouldn’t give them the phone (again, not how any of this works). The different officers who arrested Norcross also gave different — and conflicting! — reports on what happened. Again, the Chief admitted to the journalist that this isn’t how it’s supposed to work:

Chief Paul has conceded that the stated basis for the seizure was invalid: “destroying evidence is different than a locked phone, right? . . . So, if we’re destroying evidence, that’s very different than someone locking his phone.” He added that he had “heard Lieutenant Adamson’s explanation. It differs from what’s in his report, but what’s written in his report would not be a justification for seizing the phone.”

And then, later:

Officer Richardson transported Mr. Norcross, in handcuffs, to the AFPD station. Although he had been told “you are under arrest,” officers at the station called it a “detention.” Chief Paul has since acknowledged that “to detain and transport really it does turn into a de facto arrest. There’s very limited circumstances where it can remain a detention,” and he does not “believe that necessarily applied in our instance.”

Then we finally get to the crazy SWAT team raid. As was suspected, the warrant they obtained to raid the house was bullshit:

At 5:11 p.m., Officer Richardson — a POST-certified officer of roughly one year’s experience — swore out an affidavit for a warrant to search the basement apartment, Mr. Schneider’s person, and the Chevy Malibu. The only “property or evidence” the affidavit identified was “Any stolen merchandise, specifically Lego merchandise.”

To supply probable cause that stolen LEGO merchandise would be found inside, Officer Richardson swore: “The homeowner also disclosed that he could hear multiple individuals inside the residence speaking about possible stolen Lego toys that they had taken. The officer would like to search for said items.”

That statement was false. No one inside the residence discussed “stolen Lego toys that they had taken.” Whatever the homeowner may actually have said about LEGO — and there is no recording, because no officer recorded the conversation — the affidavit converted it into what amounted to an overheard confession that the occupants possessed LEGO “that they had taken.” No one inside had taken any LEGO toys. The phrase “they had taken” appears in no recording. The statement was either fabricated or recklessly embellished, and Officer Richardson knew, or recklessly disregarded, that it was false.

Officer Richardson and Lieutenant Adamson also knew facts that made the statement implausible on its face and that the affidavit omitted: that AFPD had known for days that the dispute concerned a LEGO collection in Oregon that Mr. Schneider was trying to recover through the Oregon courts, not LEGO in Mr. Schneider’s possession; that, upon information and belief, AFPD had never received any report of LEGO stolen in Utah by anyone in the residence; and that the conversation with the homeowner was not recorded.

The affidavit contained other false or misleading statements, including that the March 11 sign incident occurred on “March 3rd of 2026”; that Mr. Schneider was “arranging various amounts of individuals to go to the victim’s residence and enter his property,” when none of the Plaintiffs had entered Mr. Johnson’s property; and that the sign was “defaming.” It omitted that the owner of the fence had given permission for the sign, that Officer Richardson himself had confirmed that permission, and that Officer Richardson had already concluded that the people with Mr. Norcross had no “malicious intent.”

And then this part, which seems pretty important:

The affidavit established no probable cause to believe that any of the occupants other than Mr. Schneider had committed any crime, and it sought no authority to arrest, detain, or search anyone other than Mr. Schneider.

The lawsuit notes that a magistrate judge signed the warrant, saying that cops could search for stolen Lego merchandise (which again, the cops knew was nonsense). And, now the police chief (who originally defended these events) admits it was all a big fuck up:

Chief Paul has admitted the affidavit was a failure: “I will say that the search warrant affidavit presents one of the biggest places where we screwed up.” He continued: “This didn’t really have anything to do with Legos. We weren’t going in to look for Legos. We didn’t even search the residence for Legos.” And: “in my opinion, we should have never even put Legos in this affidavit.”

Chief Paul has also admitted that AFPD’s written safeguard failed: “a new officer wrote this affidavit. We have a clear directive and policy that search warrant affidavits have to be reviewed by a supervisor in our department, and in this case . . . [t]his did not get reviewed by a supervisor.” He summarized: “Basically what I’m getting at is we failed here.”

Um. Considering the supposedly stolen Legos (which the police already knew Schneider was looking to recover, not steal) were the entirety of the argument for the warrant, to now say that they shouldn’t have even mentioned them is a huge fucking deal.

The warrant only gave the cops permission to search for Legos, which they have now admitted they did not do. But the complaint also details that the cops laid out a plan before the raid to arrest everyone in the house, even though it was a search warrant, not an arrest warrant.

Officer Richardson prepared an operations plan for serving the warrant. By his own account, the plan was “to open the door which was presumed unlocked, and call out any present individuals one at a time, and take them into custody.” The plan thus called for taking into custody every person inside, whoever they were, before any officer knew who was there.

There’s also the issue that they burst into the house with guns drawn with no announcement:

The officers did not knock. They did not announce their authority and purpose and wait for the occupants to respond. Officer Richardson’s report claims that “[o]fficers announced ‘Police Search Warrant,’” but no announcement was made and no time was allowed for the occupants to respond before officers were in the doorway ordering them out at gunpoint. They opened the door and entered. Officer Richardson’s own body-worn camera records the team’s cue — “You ready? On you.” — followed immediately by “Everybody step out. Stand up and come outside. Right now. Let’s go. Step outside. Step outside, everybody.” The footage of the entry itself has been blacked out in the released versions of Officer Richardson’s and Officer Laycock’s footage.

Chief Paul has conceded the point: “even if the door’s propped open you, you still announce, right? . . . Just because the door’s open does not allow you on a knock-and-announce warrant to just enter the premises. Like, there’s no debating that. So, yes, that’s an issue I’ve identified as well.”

The whole thing is not how any of this is supposed to work:

Officer Richardson “held lethal coverage with [his] Patrol rifle” — that is, he pointed a rifle at the occupants — while Officer Tonga called them out one at a time and handcuffed them. Other members of the entry team likewise had firearms drawn and directed at the occupants

None of the occupants was armed. None was suspected of a violent crime. AFPD’s own Transparency Entry reports that no one other than officers brandished a weapon. Officer Richardson admitted that “[d]ue to NLETS not working, a criminal history of Benjamin Schneider was not conducted.” There was no information suggesting anyone inside posed a threat.

Ms. Lauts, Mr. Shaw, and Mr. Allen complied with every command. Each was nevertheless handcuffed, searched, and held at gunpoint and in handcuffs outside the residence. So was the 16-year-old.

And the precious, made up “stolen Legos” that the police used to get the warrant which only gave them the authority to search for those non-existent Legos?

Officers did not even search the apartment for LEGO merchandise. They spent only a few minutes inside, opened a single closet, and opened no cupboards. The return Officer Richardson swore to the next morning states: “Benjamin Schneider was arrested. No items siezed.”

Oh, but there was one other thing they were careful about while inside the house. Making sure they weren’t being recorded:

Before entering, officers discussed the occupants’ cameras. On entry, an officer turned a GoPro camera that was recording on a desk face down, and Lieutenant Adamson grabbed and twisted Mr. Schneider’s arm when he attempted to record with his phone and stopped the recording.

Then, after they arrested all of these people on zero basis, zero probable cause, zero anything, they held them for over two hours. Once again, Chief Paul told the reporter that’s not allowed:

Chief Paul has acknowledged that this was unlawful: “[W]e don’t have a categorical authority to just put . . . everyone in hand[cuffs] because of the scene of a search warrant”; “that detention mixed with transport . . . in almost every case . . . is going to turn into an arrest”; and “[w]hat these officers would have needed to have, I mean, just speaking frankly, is individualized, probable cause for all five individuals.”

The plaintiffs (in various combinations) claim that their First and Fourth Amendment rights were violated multiple times in multiple ways throughout all of this. Suing the police for violating your rights is generally pretty difficult (unfortunately). But it gets a lot easier when you have the bodycam footage, the dashcam footage, the officers’ own reports, and the Police Chief on tape repeatedly admitting to the very unlawful behavior you’re suing over.

So this whole mess started because a group of young adults were trying to help someone else get back Lego sets that BAM held onto (and which, many months later, BAM finally returned only some of). While their actions may have been a bit awkward and goofy, the basic details were easily available to the AFPD. Instead, AFPD’s response was to — largely because of questionable claims from people connected to BAM — stop the participants with made-up traffic violations, detain them illegally for hours, seize phones on no basis, raid the home they were staying in on false pretenses, hold them at gunpoint, and drag them all to the police station. The Chief now admits that much of this was clearly wrong.

The reality seems to be what one of the AFPD cops said early on: the cops decided to abuse their power (including their guns and ability to obtain search warrants) to “scare him a little bit.” Right now, it kinda seems that the people who should be scared of the legal liability they have created for themselves are the AFPD officers who created all this legal liability for themselves by trampling the constitutional rights of the people they’re supposed to serve.