In the police state being erected around us, the police can probe,
poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone
they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing
of the courts. Making matters worse, however, police dogs—cute, furry,
tail-wagging mascots with a badge—have now been elevated to the ranks of
inerrant, infallible sanctimonious accusers with the power of the state
behind them. This is largely due to the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent
ruling in Florida v. Harris, in which a unanimous Court
declared roadside stops to be Constitution-free zones where police may
search our vehicles based upon a hunch and the presence of a frisky
canine.
This is what one would call a slow death by a thousand cuts, only it’s
the Fourth Amendment being inexorably bled to death. This latest wound,
in which a unanimous Supreme Court determined that police officers may
use drug-sniffing dogs to conduct warrantless searches of cars during
routine traffic stops, comes on the heels of recent decisions by the
Court that give police the green light to taser defenseless motorists,
strip search non-violent suspects arrested for minor incidents, and
break down people’s front doors without evidence that they have done
anything wrong.
These are the hallmarks of the emerging American police state, where
police officers, no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with
keeping the peace, are part of an elite ruling class dependent on
keeping the masses corralled, under control, and treated like suspects
and enemies rather than citizens. Whether it’s police officers breaking
through people’s front doors and shooting them dead in their homes or
strip searching innocent motorists on the side of the road, in a police
state such as ours, these instances of abuse are not condemned by the
government. Rather, they are continually validated by a judicial system
that kowtows to every police demand, no matter how unjust, no matter how
in opposition to the Constitution.
The justices of the United States Supreme Court through their deference
to police power, preference for security over freedom, and evisceration
of our most basic rights for the sake of order and expediency have
become the architects of the American police state.
In
Florida v. Harris, for example, the Court was presented
with the case of Clayton Harris who, in 2006, was pulled over by Officer
William Wheetley for having an expired license tag. During the stop,
Wheetley decided that Harris was acting suspicious and requested to
search his vehicle. Harris refused, so Wheetley brought out his
drug-sniffing dog, Aldo, to walk around Harris’ car. Aldo allegedly
alerted to the door handle of Harris’ car, leading Wheetley to search
the vehicle.
Although the search of Harris’ car did not turn up any of the drugs
which Aldo was actually trained to detect, such as marijuana, Wheetley
found pseudophedrine, a common ingredient in cold medicine, and other
materials allegedly used in the manufacture of methamphetamine. Harris
was arrested and released on bail, during which time he was again
stopped by Officer Wheetley and again subjected to a warrantless search
of his vehicle based upon Aldo’s alert, but this time Wheetley found
nothing.
Harris challenged the search, arguing that the police had not provided
sufficient evidence that Aldo was a reliable drug-sniffing dog, thus his
supposed alert on Harris’ door did not give the officer probable cause
to search the vehicle. The Florida Supreme Court agreed, ruling that
police should be able to prove that the dog actually has a track record
of finding drugs while in the field before it is used as an excuse for a
warrantless search.
Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court did not see it that way. In
reversing the Florida Supreme Court’s ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court
sided with police by claiming that all that the police need to do to
prove probable cause for a search is simply assert that a drug detection
dog has received proper training. As such, the Court has now given the
police free reign to use dogs as “search warrants on leashes,”
justifying any and all police searches of vehicles stopped on the
roadside. The ruling turns man’s best friend into an extension of the
police state.
The Supreme Court’s decision is particularly alarming when one
considers that drug-sniffing dogs, even expertly trained dogs with
reliable handlers, are rarely accurate. One study demonstrated that dogs
were incorrect in drug identification up to 60% of the time. A 2011
study published in Animal Cognition involved a series of tests,
some designed to fool the dog and some designed to fool the handler.
The dogs in these tests falsely alerted 123 out of a total of 144 times.
When a test was designed to fool the handler rather than the dog, the
dog was twice as likely to falsely alert.
As the Animal Cognition study shows, dogs are heavily
influenced by the behavior and biases of their handlers. If an officer
thinks he is likely to find something, whether due to personal bias or
because he finds the suspect suspicious, he often cues his
dog—consciously or unconsciously—to alert on the area to be searched.
Despite being presented with numerous reports documenting flaws in the
use of drug-detection dogs, the U.S. Supreme Court opted to ignore
plentiful evidence that drug dog alerts are specious at best. Moreover,
the justices also chose to interpret Aldo’s failure to detect any of the
drugs he was trained to find during the two sniff searches around
Harris’ car as proof of Aldo’s superior sniffing skills rather than
glaring proof that drug-sniffing dogs
do make mistakes.
Incredibly, the Court suggested that the dog alert was due to Aldo
having smelled an odor that was transferred to the car door after the
defendant used methamphetamine—a supposition that is nearly impossible
to prove.
Law enforcement officials have come up with a slew of clever excuses to
“explain” the not uncommon phenomenon of dogs that alert but fail to
uncover drugs. For example, in 2008, U.S. border patrol agent
Christopher Jbara claimed that a dog alerted to a car containing no
drugs because the car’s window “had been washed by a window washer on
the street… and the water used to clean it could have been contaminated
with bong water.” The real reason may be that the odors which dogs are
trained to detect are simply chemical compositions found in a number of
common products. For example, to a dog, perfume may smell like cocaine,
glue may smell like heroin, and mosquito repellant may smell like the
drug ecstasy.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s decision is merely the latest in a
long line of abuses justified by an institution concerned more with
establishing order and protecting government agents than with upholding
the rights enshrined in the Constitution. For example, in 2011, the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Kentucky v. King that police may smash down doors of homes or apartments without a
warrant when in search of illegal drugs which they suspect might be
destroyed. Despite the fact that police busted in on the wrong suspect in the wrong apartment, the Court sanctioned the warrantless raid, saying that police had acted lawfully and that was all that mattered.
In April 2012, a divided Supreme Court ruled in
Florence v. Burlington that any person who is arrested and processed at a jail house,
regardless of the severity of his or her offense (i.e., they can be
guilty of nothing more than a minor traffic offense), can be subjected
to a strip search by police or jail officials, which involves exposing
the genitals and the buttocks.
This “license to probe” is being extended to roadside stops, as police
officers throughout the country have begun performing roadside strip
searches without any evidence of wrongdoing and without a warrant. For
example, Angel Dobbs and her niece, who were pulled over by a Texas
state trooper on July 13, 2012, allegedly for flicking cigarette butts
out of the car window, were subjected to roadside cavity searches of
their anus and vagina. The officer claimed to be searching for
marijuana. No marijuana was found.
With case after case stacking up in which the courts empower the police
to run roughshod over citizens’ rights, the Constitution be damned, the
outlook is decidedly grim. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court still has to
rule on another drug-sniffing, dog-related case,
Florida v. Jardines,
which challenges warrantless searches of individuals’ homes based on
questionable dog alerts. For those hoping that our rights will be
restored or at least protected, you could have a long wait.
Indeed, the next decision from the Supreme Court might just take the Fourth Amendment down for the count.
https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_us_supreme_court_architects_of_the_american_police_state
What does a police state look like?
What does a police state really look like in practice in America? Is
it the cartoonish dystopia of sci-fi books? Is it like 1998′s “The
Siege,” which predicted a wholesale instatement of martial law? Or in
the age of the drone-wielding police department,
is it something more mundane and subtle yet nonetheless pernicious?
From this city in the middle of Middle America, it looks like the
latter.
Over the last decade, former Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper was gaining national plaudits for his
geek-scientist charm, he was overseeing a police department that has
become so violent toward citizens, that the U.S. Department of Justice
is now considering a formal civil rights investigation. In all, a Cato Institute study shows that in terms of official misconduct, Denver’s police force is the sixth worst in the entire country.
After the 2008 Democratic convention, Hickenlooper’s
administration was forced to settle a lawsuit showing evidence that he
ordered his police force to engage in “indiscriminate arrests.”
In
2011, new Mayor Michael Hancock joined with now-Gov. Hickenlooper to
become the first government officials to sic riot-gear-clad police on
peaceful Occupy Denver protesters, thus turning the state Capitol
grounds into the visual definition of the term “police state.” The episode included firing tear gas and rubber bullets at unarmed citizens.
As a follow-up, rather than initiating a formal investigation into the police, the Denver City Council then passed an ordinance
empowering police to arrest homeless people, effectively criminalizing
poverty in the middle of a recession and foreclosure crisis. Meanwhile,
as the police department continues to reinstate officers who have been caught brutally beating citizens, the department’s independent oversight office is so flooded with brutality charges that it cannot even process them all.
Considering
this, you might think that the state’s largest newspaper, the Denver
Post, would be sounding the alarm. But quite the opposite has happened:
It has used its monopoly power to cheer on the police state.
This weekend, however, was perhaps the shining example of what the propaganda of a police state really looks like. Next to a
hysterical screed railing on a state proposal to guarantee firefighters’ workplace rights, the Post published an editorial
opposing
legislation to prevent municipal police departments from using armed
drones. That’s right, in response to an initiative that would prevent
“police from outfitting drones with devices such as Tasers and teargas,”
the newspaper of record in a city already plagued by police violence
says such an idea is “a step too far.”
If you don’t live in Denver
but this nonetheless all sounds familiar, that’s not surprising. As the
recession has caused more social foment across the country, and as
media has consolidated into the hands of fewer and fewer
status-quo-loving plutocrats, the collective response from the power
establishment has been authoritarian in nature. We see it in New York
City, where
surveillance and
stop-and-frisk tactics are running
rampant — and yet where billionaire media mogul Michael Bloomberg is regularly portrayed in the media as a great
“freedom mayor,” thanks, in part, to the fact that reporters
fear he will be their boss one day. And we see it in other cities where police are
trying to prevent citizens from even documenting acts of police brutality.
http://www.salon.com/2013/02/12/what_does_a_police_state_look_like/
