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However, Mikkelsen claims that officers wouldn't let him leave, even after determining that he wasn't legally drunk.
"They said somebody had to come pick me up," he says.
With his friend in no condition to drive, Mikkelsen had to call his parents for a ride home.
"To me, it wasn't really embarrassing," he says. "It was just ridiculous."
Mikkelsen's protests have led to a handful of confrontations with the police. While some police officers ask what he's doing and then ignore him, others have tried to silence him. He says he was once handcuffed for protesting a checkpoint. Another time, he was held on a Terry stop, in which officers can briefly detain a person thought to be committing a crime. He wasn't arrested either time.
A protest in June left Mikkelsen claiming that a police officer had violated his First Amendment rights. Mikkelsen filed a community complaint with the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department alleging that an officer stole his "Checkpoint Ahead" sign.
It was just after 2 a.m., and Mikkelsen, positioned at Truman and McGee, was warning drivers of a checkpoint on Interstate 70. Mikkelsen maintains that an officer watched him for several minutes before she approached him. He says she told him, "No, you're not doing that," and took his sign.
"Don't touch my sign," Mikkelsen recalls telling the officer, who put the sign in the passenger seat of her police van and drove away.
"She didn't accuse me of anything," he says. "It didn't seem like she was doing any police activity. To me, it's just politically motivated theft."
Mikkelsen spent the rest of that night searching for his sign, an ordeal that he streamed live online. He drove from the checkpoint to several police stations before finally finding his sign sitting on a bench outside a police department gas station on Prospect.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas and Western Missouri got involved after the sign-snatching incident. Chief Counsel and Legal Director Doug Bonney complained to the KCPD's attorney that the officer had violated Mikkelsen's free-speech rights.
The call worked. Mikkelsen says Kansas City police haven't hassled him since the ACLU's intervention.
"They leave me alone now," he says.
However, Mikkelsen was arrested in August, but not for his crusade against sobriety checkpoints. A woman in Columbia reported that Mikkelsen sexually assaulted her after a night of drinking.
Columbia police Public Information Officer Latisha Stroer says the woman told police that she and her boyfriend had been drinking at their residence with Mikkelsen on the evening of August 27. Mikkelsen had planned on crashing at the couple's home. The next morning, according to the police report, the woman, in bed with her boyfriend, awoke to find Mikkelsen having intercourse with her. Stroer says the boyfriend woke up and witnessed the woman pushing Mikkelsen off her. Mikkelsen left the scene and was arrested around 7 a.m.
Mikkelsen is charged with felony sexual assault.
"I deny the allegations," Mikkelsen tells The Pitch.
Mikkelsen's preliminary hearing occurred as this issue went to press.
Mikkelsen does have allies in his stand against sobriety checkpoints. A Kansas City man named Tim (he asked that his last name not be used, to avoid bringing attention to himself or his family) runs the KCCheckpoint Twitter account and website. Tim has never met Mikkelsen, but the two share the feed and the website with another man, who also asked to remain anonymous.
The KCCheckpoint Twitter feed is their most powerful tool. They retweet a daily stream of 140-character warnings about speed traps, accidents and locations of checkpoints to more than 5,000 followers.
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