HIGH COURT BARS CHECKPOINTS FOR DRUG SEARCHES

S.F. police, ACLU both praise ruling

The U.S. Supreme Court barred officers yesterday from using roadblocks to
stop cars at random and check for drugs, a ruling applauded by San Francisco
police as well as the ACLU.

In a 6-to-3 decision, the court said such roadblocks in Indianapolis violate
the constitutional ban on seizures without evidence of wrongdoing, because
drivers were being stopped by police without any reason to believe they were
carrying contraband.

Civil rights lawyers had feared the court would use the case to expand past
rulings upholding police checkpoints to stop drunken drivers and illegal
immigrants.

"It's a huge relief," said Michelle Alexander, director of the Racial
Justice Project for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern
California.

"A ruling the other way would have given the green light to law enforcement
agencies all over the country to set up roadblocks in predominantly minority
areas deemed high-crime. Finally, the Supreme Court seems to be putting the
brakes on the evisceration of the Fourth Amendment in the pursuit of the war
on drugs."

She said she knows of no checkpoints in California like those in
Indianapolis, which were set up in high-crime areas in August 1998. Police
there stopped a predetermined number of drivers, looked for signs of
intoxication, peered inside their cars and led a drug-sniffing dog around
each vehicle.

According to the court, out of 1,161 vehicle stops in two months, 104
motorists were arrested, 55 of them for drugs.

San Francisco Police Inspector Sherman Ackerson, a department spokesman,
said the Indianapolis program went too far.

"It's just as well that the court threw it out," he said. "We've never
entertained the idea of simply stopping people for drugs. That kind of thing
often leads to other problems like (racial) profiling."

The court said it had upheld vehicle stops without individual suspicion in
the past -- for illegal immigration in 1976 and for drunken drivers in 1980
- -- because of special needs, beyond everyday law enforcement: securing the
nation's borders, and keeping the highways safe. Similarly, mandatory drug
testing of certain types of employees and other groups has been allowed
without evidence that they were using drugs.

But the Indianapolis program was a crime-control measure and was thus
subject to the Fourth Amendment's requirement of reasonable searches and
seizures, based on evidence of individual wrongdoing, the court said.

"Without drawing the line at roadblocks designed primarily to serve the
general interest in crime control, the Fourth Amendment would do little to
prevent such intrusions from becoming a routine part of American life," said
the opinion by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

"We cannot sanction stops justified only by the generalized and ever-
present possibility that interrogation and inspection may reveal that any
given motorist has committed some crime."

In dissent, Chief Justice William Rehnquist said the stops imposed only a
"minimal intrusion" and, like the previously upheld roadblocks for drunken
drivers, were a legitimate public safety measure. He was joined by Justices
Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

The ACLU's Alexander said the intrusion was more than minimal.

"Anyone who has experienced being stopped, questioned and having a
drug-sniffing dog encircle their vehicle has felt threatened, especially
people of color and poor people," she said.

Bay Area legal scholars said the court had drawn an important line.

"What we've been seeing is an increasing effort to set up roadblocks or
other broad measures of interdiction on an increasing number of
circumstances, " said Charles Weisselberg, a professor at UC-Berkeley's
Boalt Hall School of Law.

"The court apparently felt that if this trend continued completely unchecked
that there would be little left of the Fourth Amendment."

-The case is Indianapolis vs. Edmond, No. 99-1030.
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