It's worth noting that these civil asset forfeiture programs were sold to a lot of these small towns as a way of generating revenue off of popular drug routes.

It's worth noting that these civil asset forfeiture programs were sold to a lot of these small towns as a way of generating revenue off of popular drug routes. E.g., a town is off a highway that's a known part of a drug route. A consultant comes in to the police dept. and does a powerpoint showing an average annual amount of drug money they can confiscate in order to fund the police/town budget. And the consultant probably has numbers from other towns who did the same. Boom-- you've got yet another civil asset forfeiture program in yet another small town. So you get this town's police pulling over a larger and larger set of people who fit whatever description they've taught themselves rakes in the dough. There's a big incentive to do this, and to enlarge the set of who can be pulled because-- until relatively recently-- there has been very little risk. I'm going to rankly speculate that the value of the OP's stuff he was lugging was high enough for such officers to take the time to pull OP over. But since OP didn't fit the drug runner description and the officer couldn't find any other pretense, they let them go. I'll also rankly speculate you've carried stuff of much less value visible to an officer who sees you drive by. Race almost certainly plays into this as well, but I haven't read a study to know the numbers on that.