LETTING POLICE SEARCH WITHOUT SUSPICION ERODES FREEDOMS

Had the Street Crimes Unit of the New York City police not made a career of
harassing people based on their age, sex and skin color -- aggressively
asking them intrusive questions and subjecting them to pat-down searches --
Amadou Diallo would probably be alive today.

Only in the vaguest, most unsubstantiated way was Diallo a criminal suspect.

He had done nothing to arouse suspicion except that he was a 22-year-old
African immigrant outside his Bronx apartment late at night. Police
approached him as they have done thousands of his neighbors, asking
questions, barking orders.

When he turned from them, things escalated and Diallo, pulling out his
wallet, was shot to death when the officers mistook it for a gun. But the
condemnation that has been raining down on these officers, who were
recently acquitted of any charges, should be directed in equal measure to
the form of policing that replaces individual guilt with collective
intimidation.

Individual suspicion is a concept that breathes life into American freedoms.

Before police can stop and search someone, they have to be able to point to
evidence of his criminality. The Fourth Amendment says to police: "Unless
you have something on the guy, don't bother him." Conceptually, at least,
this gives us a realm of privacy that the government can't penetrate
without a good reason and ostensibly prevents suspicionless searches.

The reality is something different.

Government officials don't like the inconvenience of having to justify
their snooping and have pushed hard to create exceptions to individual
suspicion.

New York's Street Crimes Unit, for example, exploits a U.S. Supreme Court
decision that allows police to stop and frisk people acting suspiciously
who they believe might be carrying a weapon. They use the case as a license
to scrutinize anyone young, male and black.

Worse, in recent years, police have been given even broader powers to
harass innocent people.

By systematically removing certain types of searches from constitutional
protection and by giving the nod to a range of suspicionless searches, the
court has laid ruin to our privacy rights. Minority youths may be the
greatest victims of arbitrary police intrusions, but we're all susceptible.

Entrenchments on American freedoms are always made with the highest of
purpose, and approving the use of DUI roadblocks was no different. Ten
years ago, in one of its worst genie-out-of-the-bottle decisions, the U.S.
Supreme Court allowed their use to combat the scourge of drunk driving.

Yes, getting drunks off the road is a worthy goal, but so is virtually all
law enforcement. If dragnet seizures are justified to find drunk drivers,
then why not to find people with outstanding arrest warrants, unregistered
guns in their cars or drug runners?

Aren't these concerns also important to public safety?

Yup, that's precisely what law enforcement agencies said to themselves, and
voila, the drug interdiction roadblock was born. Often set up in inner-city
neighborhoods, police systematically stop cars so a drug-sniffing dog can
take a whiff.

Next term, the Supreme Court will decide their legitimacy in a case out of
Indiana. But if the court doesn't nip this in the bud, the car will become
a search-at-will zone.

Then there are the rhetorical games the courts play by narrowly defining
what constitutes a search. Is the specter of police pawing through your
garbage a search?

Sure looks like one, but it's not according to the courts, because you
don't have an expectation of privacy in what you've thrown away. What else
looks and feels like a search but isn't in the view of courts?

Police hovering over a back yard, looking through windows, reading personal
bank and medical records, listening in on cell phone conversations, and
police dogs sniffing cars for drugs.

In a case currently before the Supreme Court, police say they should be
allowed to freely grab and squeeze overhead luggage to try and determine
what's inside.

The government says "no search here" since passengers on buses expect their
packages to be jostled by fellow travelers.

Well, our bodies get jostled on buses as well. Does that give police leave
to probe there, too?

Remember, this is what police can do to people whom they have no reason to
believe have done anything wrong.

Police with cause to suspect someone's engaging in criminal activity are
already free to perform all sorts of searches, with and without a warrant.

But victims of roadblocks and "non-searches" don't have to be criminal
suspects.

No wonder police are considered the enemy in many urban neighborhoods.
They've been given the raw power to humiliate.

Individual suspicion is the only thing that protects us from being utterly
subject to police whim. Without it, we get the kind of lazy, biased police
investigation techniques used by four officers to confront an unarmed young
man in the Bronx.