Earlier I read about a new police tactic in the war on drugs.
An Ohio law enforcement agency’s decision to use fake drug checkpoints to search drivers and their cars for drugs has some residents wondering if it could violate the Fourth Amendment against unlawful searches and seizures.
Police in Cleveland suburb of Mayfield Heights recently posted large yellow signs along Interstate 271 that warned drivers that there was a drug checkpoint ahead, to be prepared to stop and that there was a drug-sniffing police dog in use.
There was no such checkpoint, just police officers waiting to see if any drivers would react suspiciously after seeing the signs.
Authorities say that four people were stopped, with some arrests and drugs seized. They declined to be more specific.
Excuse me, but if it looks like a checkpoint, has large signs, people are being warned to be prepared to stop, people are stopped, and police then search for drugs and make arrests, then what the hell is “fake” about it? Police have the power and authority to make people obey them at gunpoint, it is a crime not to cooperate with them, and motorists are supposed to obey all signs. What is fake about power, authority, and lethal force?
What’s next? “Fake” search warrants? (“We have a search warrant to search your home, so you better let us in.”) Planting “fake” drugs in a car to obtain incriminating statements? “Fake” SWAT Team raids? “Fake” arrests? “Fake” (but lethal) shootings?
I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.
Comments
3 responses to “There is nothing fake about uniformed thugs doing whatever they want”
This is an old practice. I encountered it outside Chapel Hill, NC when the Dead came to town in 1993. The word got around and few of us fell for it.
South Carolina law is interesting, avoiding a checkpoint is NOT grounds for a stop.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
? Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
There have to be consequences.