COURT WISELY UPHOLDS PRIVACY RIGHTS

The following editorial appeared in the Ottawa Citizen.

The Supreme Court of Canada, by deciding that a pedestrian's pockets are
protected from being poked around in by the police, has found the right
balance between ensuring the safety of law enforcement officers and
upholding the constitutional rights of Canadians. As the court makes clear,
police officers need to protect themselves, but their right to safety is
separate from their powers of investigation.

In December 2000, Winnipeg police were investigating a nearby burglary and
stopped Philip Mann late at night because he fit the description of the
suspect. So far, so good. If he had been the person they were looking for,
he might have had housebreaking tools that could be used as weapons, so
they frisked him. That was fine, too.

But they went too far by snaking a hand into the "kangaroo pouch" on the
front of his shirt, having felt something soft and crinkly therein. It
turned out to be marijuana, and they arrested him for that (but not for
anything to do with the burglary).

If the thing in his pocket had been metallic and shaped like a gun or a
knife, the police could have taken it out. "The search must ... be confined
in scope to an intrusion reasonably designed to locate weapons," Justice
Frank Iacobucci writes for the majority of the court. Otherwise, it's none
of the police's business, however suspicious it might be.

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms says the police can't go rifling through
your things without a good reason, which is fundamental to Canadians'
freedom to go out in public. If the charges against Mann had been allowed
to stand, police could have started searching anyone they even slightly
suspected of any crime, and then arresting anyone who turned out to be up
to any kind of no good -- and violated the privacy of a lot of innocent
people along the way.