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Yes, you can be charged. Convicted is a separate discussion. The officer could charge you with making a false report to a police officer, which includes lying about an investigation. I seriously doubt the charge would result in a conviction, but I can see some jurisdictions taking it to trial. Others would drop the charges after you spent a night in jail and posted bond enough to get out. It takes awhile for the case to get to the DA's office for a decision on prosecuting, but I can definitely see the charge.

Jim and i8godzilla,

There is a legal difference between disarming the person for safety and reading the serial number for a weapons check. There is also a legal difference between an arrest and a detention, though it is a very confusing area.

In my opinion, running the serial number is a search. If the officer disarmed the person just so he could get the serial number to run, it is an illegal search. If he disarmed the person according to the law (for the protection of someone), then it might be a legal search. As a general rule, the SCOTUS has upheld that an officer may seize anything that is in plain view when he is in a place he has a legal right to be in. This includes serial numbers (IIRC the case was the result of an officer turning stereos around in a pawn shop to read the numbers - if he could see them without moving them, it would be legal but moving them was not).

An officer does not have the right to search everyone he stops, though this may get changed. An officer can perform a search incident to a legal arrest. This was long established as an exception to the warrant requirement both for the safety of the institution the arrestee would be taken to and to gather more evidence before the arrestee could destroy or dispose of it. But, until the Terry case, an officer had no legal right to detain people without an arrest. This is the case that invented the investigatory detention and confuses the issue. It allows for a detention that is not an arrest but the subject cannot leave at will and it allows for a very limited search for the officer's safety (frisk must be for a weapon). Under this case, the subject must still be arrested to perform a real search. Since the officer is in possession of the weapon and it is no longer a possible threat, running it become very questionable, legally.

But then, to get this even more confusing, along comes the Kurtz case in Texas. This is a case on jurisdiction primarily, but it also had an unusual ruling in it that was where the question of jurisdiction arose from. The Court of Criminal Appeals said that any traffic stop was an arrest because the officer had legal authority to arrest but no legal authority to stop or detain, as written into the Transportation Code. They were quick to clarify that it is not a custodial arrest that would trigger the Miranda warnings (a separate twist of logic I don't understand that can be argued later) but to leaves open two serious questions: does an officer need probable cause to make a traffic stop (many cops disagree with me on this) and can an officer search any car he stops incident to a legal arrest.

The second question is the one that would be relevant to this discussion. If the officer can now legally search the car and anyone in it, the running of the serial number is not a civil rights violation. If the arrest does not arise to that level since it is non-custodial, the running of the serial number would need to be justified as a search some other legal way.

It boils down, in my opinion, to how well the officer can write the report. If he can justify disarming the person for safety, he can then legally run the weapon. If not, he cannot. And the courts have ruled many times that things like this cannot be justified on general grounds (like I disarm every CHL I stop) but must have specific articulable reasons that this stop was dangerous (this is also based on Terry).