Well….was going to talk about politics this morning but a couple of articles that I’ve read in the past few days set me on a different path….politics will wait until I do this one. First, there was the Cali supreme court ruling that if a person is stopped for any reason, their possessions can be searched as well as their body…in this particular case, a man was stopped for “suspicion” of some crime; not charged but stopped for questioning…the police were then allowed to search his cellphone for text or other communication that may have had reference to drugs in it…well, they found reference to ‘smoking up” or some such thing and used those words to justify searching him and his car where they found a small amount of marijuana and charged him with a felony. This has been decried by all constitutional scholars as a shredding of the fourth amendment since it now allows you, your car, or since you have your house keys on you normally, your house to be searched on the vaguest kind of innuendo or suspicion. Never mind that the 4th amendment states that they need a warrant for such things…these guys just don’t care….
Then next one comes out of a study in the Chicago Tribune today where they analyzed the use of “drug dogs” to find drugs in traffic stops…and the findings were startling in the damage that these tactics have done to our rights…the researchers found that while the police still see the idea that dogs are infallible and the courts agree with them, the data of their abject failure has been suppressed by law enforcement who depend on these dogs to get to their ends of being able to search anyone at any time without probable cause. The statistics are horrifying…in only 30% of the stops and searches that were triggered by dogs were there any drugs found…and in only 1 in 8 of the stops on Hispanics were drugs found. The study goes on to say that dogs can give a false positive for many reasons, with the most cited one being that the officer telegraphed that he wanted the dog to alert. I hope some of you can see the potential for abuse that these kids of things have….and I have only one question for the tea partiers…with your supposed reverence for the constitution, where is your cry for these things to be changed? Not gonna happen….again, I fear for our wonderful country…geez…
Look, before you get it in your head, I want to address the old saw that states “if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you won’t mind being searched” that the law and order types use as a hammer to attack those of us that still revere the constitution and the protections that it gives us. Why do you think there is a fourth amendment? Because the founding fathers had seen unwarranted, capricious, detentions used for repression of the populace across Europe and in the colonies and wanted to make sure that could not happen in our country. It is one of the primary reasons we fought the revolutionary war…and that is not just my opinion…look it up…I find it so sad that the people who have been protected since the country’s founding by the bill of rights now are so fast to abandon it for some temporary safety….