The Rights of the People Read Online Free
Author: David K. Shipler
prying eyes. The Court has defined “reasonable suspicion” as stronger than a hunch but a good deal weaker than the “probable cause” demanded by the authors of the Constitution. 3 Probable cause requires a preponderance of evidence, “a fair probability that contraband or evidence of a crime will be found,” the justices ruled in 1983. 4 By contrast, reasonable suspicion requires only “some minimal level of objective justification for making a stop,” the Court stated in 1989, 5 and the “minimal level” has become an expanding loophole allowing Sergeant Neill and other law enforcement officers to look in the pockets, cars, and purses of people on the margins of society.
Patting down nonwhites on the streets is the crude, intimate version of a wide enhancement of police power, a broad intrusion on personal privacy that has grown technologically sophisticated as government has probed computerized medical records, e-mail messages, credit-card transactions, financial transfers, and other digital information. Whether the search is an antiseptic invasion by electronic gadgets or a midnight frisk by groping hands, the individual in America is losing a preciousingredient of a free life, especially in the twilight wars against terrorism and in the deep night of mean neighborhoods. Those are the places, most distant from those who make the rules, where the limits on police action grow less and less visible.
When
Terry
was decided, the lone dissenter on the Court, Justice William O. Douglas, worried about an oppressive result. “The term ‘probable cause’ rings a bell of certainty that is not sounded by phrases such as ‘reasonable suspicion,’ ” he warned. “If the individual is no longer to be sovereign, if the police can pick him up whenever they do not like the cut of his jib, if they can ‘seize’ and ‘search’ him in their discretion, we enter a new regime.”
Terry
’s looser standards applied only to a stop and frisk, not to the search of a house. So, a policeman acting on mere “reasonable suspicion” could now pat down a pedestrian with less evidence than the stricter “probable cause” that was still required for a judge to sign a search warrant. This struck Douglas as a chilling irony. “To give the police greater power than a magistrate is to take a long step down the totalitarian path,” he declared. “Perhaps such a step is desirable to cope with modern forms of lawlessness. But if it is taken, it should be the deliberate choice of the people through a constitutional amendment.”
No such amendment has been needed in the gritty life of the streets. So common have warrantless searches become in the neighborhoods worked by Neill that when the “jump-outs” arrive, certain blocks and courtyards are suddenly torn away from the fabric of American liberties and hurled into scattered moments of “a new regime.”
Neill had nothing close to probable cause when he saw the two young men walking away, but he felt reasonable suspicion that they had something to hide. They were doing exactly what he had described during a class I had watched him teach at the police academy three weeks earlier, so he flashed me a foxy grin. “Just like training,” he said.
In the training, Neill and two detectives had shown videos and played roles to teach nineteen experienced officers how to spot clues that someone might be carrying a weapon. Race, an undercurrent, went unmentioned, although Neill was white, one of the two detectives was white, most members of the class were white, and their targets were generally black. On the street, though, race seems less of a divide than the line between officer and civilian: Black cops are perfectly capable of hassling black citizens.
“A good policeman is what?” Neill began.
“Nosy,” said one of the two black women in the group.
“A good policeman is nosy,” Neill declared, making it sound like a motto that should be posted over the door of every
Patting down nonwhites on the streets is the crude, intimate version of a wide enhancement of police power, a broad intrusion on personal privacy that has grown technologically sophisticated as government has probed computerized medical records, e-mail messages, credit-card transactions, financial transfers, and other digital information. Whether the search is an antiseptic invasion by electronic gadgets or a midnight frisk by groping hands, the individual in America is losing a preciousingredient of a free life, especially in the twilight wars against terrorism and in the deep night of mean neighborhoods. Those are the places, most distant from those who make the rules, where the limits on police action grow less and less visible.
When
Terry
was decided, the lone dissenter on the Court, Justice William O. Douglas, worried about an oppressive result. “The term ‘probable cause’ rings a bell of certainty that is not sounded by phrases such as ‘reasonable suspicion,’ ” he warned. “If the individual is no longer to be sovereign, if the police can pick him up whenever they do not like the cut of his jib, if they can ‘seize’ and ‘search’ him in their discretion, we enter a new regime.”
Terry
’s looser standards applied only to a stop and frisk, not to the search of a house. So, a policeman acting on mere “reasonable suspicion” could now pat down a pedestrian with less evidence than the stricter “probable cause” that was still required for a judge to sign a search warrant. This struck Douglas as a chilling irony. “To give the police greater power than a magistrate is to take a long step down the totalitarian path,” he declared. “Perhaps such a step is desirable to cope with modern forms of lawlessness. But if it is taken, it should be the deliberate choice of the people through a constitutional amendment.”
No such amendment has been needed in the gritty life of the streets. So common have warrantless searches become in the neighborhoods worked by Neill that when the “jump-outs” arrive, certain blocks and courtyards are suddenly torn away from the fabric of American liberties and hurled into scattered moments of “a new regime.”
Neill had nothing close to probable cause when he saw the two young men walking away, but he felt reasonable suspicion that they had something to hide. They were doing exactly what he had described during a class I had watched him teach at the police academy three weeks earlier, so he flashed me a foxy grin. “Just like training,” he said.
In the training, Neill and two detectives had shown videos and played roles to teach nineteen experienced officers how to spot clues that someone might be carrying a weapon. Race, an undercurrent, went unmentioned, although Neill was white, one of the two detectives was white, most members of the class were white, and their targets were generally black. On the street, though, race seems less of a divide than the line between officer and civilian: Black cops are perfectly capable of hassling black citizens.
“A good policeman is what?” Neill began.
“Nosy,” said one of the two black women in the group.
“A good policeman is nosy,” Neill declared, making it sound like a motto that should be posted over the door of every
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