The Rights of the People Read Online Free Page B

outside to be moving.… Look for people to react to you, look for cars that try to cut into your convoys. And most importantly, look for those guys [who] start movin’ to the cars when you pull up—somethin’s goin’ on. They start runnin’ out of there when somethin’ pulls up, better start hittin’ the brakes, buddy, cause somethin’s gettin’ ready to happen.”
    In Washington, the class of police officers was told to make sure the pat-down was thorough. A black instructor, Detective Ali Ramadhan, assumed the frisk position with his back to the class and his hands on the chalkboard. “Check his hands. Take them off the wall. One guy had a derringer in his palm,” he said. “I could have been killed.”
    “In every cellblock in this city,” Sloan warned, “there’s been a gun making it to the cellblock. A derringer was found in the shoe of a guy in the cellblock.” An officer in the class told of a new model that folds, looks like a cell phone or a pager, and can fire four .22 rounds. Others had heard about it.
    The crotch is a favorite hiding place, Sloan told them. “Put your fingers between the belt and the waistband. He may say, ‘I’m sensitive down there.’ Well, aren’t we all. Or, ‘I have a colostomy bag.’ Well, don’t we all. ‘Ijust had surgery.’ Don’t let him bullshit you. You continue, no matter how much he runs his mouth. Do a good search.”
    Under
Terry
, a frisk is supposed to be brief and superficial, restricted to feeling outer garments based on the suspicion that there’s a dangerous weapon, not drugs or other criminal evidence. That led one young, well-spoken uniformed cop in the class to wear a puzzled look as he listened to story after story about doing pat-downs. “How is it you patted him down?” he finally asked.
    “For his safety and my safety,” said Ramadhan, using the standard justification.
    The young cop declared: “Under
Terry v. Ohio
you have to have articulated suspicion.”
    “I know he’s a drug dealer,” Ramadhan replied. “I know he’s got a gun. I pat everybody down.”
    “I’m not saying we don’t, and we all do,” the cop confessed. “But legally we can’t.”
    “If I’m in [mostly white] Georgetown and the guy’s in a business suit,” Ramadhan noted, “I’m not gonna pat him down.” It was an unusual admission to profiling. Later, I asked him if he really frisked everybody he encountered in the rough neighborhoods. No, he said, only when “something in the back of my head says danger.”
    Neill had another take on this. “Making a stop of cars in these neighborhoods, you’ll more than likely get a gun,” he told the class. It was a wild exaggeration, based on what I saw in my nights with his unit. “I ask them if they got drugs or guns in the car. What do they always say? ‘No.’ Then I say, ‘Can I search your car?’ Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time they say, ‘Yes.’ When they say, ‘No,’ I got to decide whether to search them anyway.”
    “Do you savagely search?” an officer asked.
    “We savagely search,” Neill replied.
    In effect, the Court has given permission for this, as summed up by the Metropolitan Police Department’s handout for the class: “For too long police officers have been trained to view the Constitution of the United States and its judicial interpretations as placing rigid restrictions on what law enforcement personnel can do on the street while shielding criminals from detection.… The members of the … Gun Recovery Unit have viewed the Constitution and its associated case law as a law enforcement sword rather than a shield. It is a sword because it provides police officers with a lesser standard than probable cause, i.e. ‘reasonable suspicion’ to better enable them to identify individuals who carry illegal firearms.”
    • • •
    I came away thinking that the
Terry
stop was morphing from merely protective into investigative. A federal narcotics prosecutor