LTE in response to 'Knock and Walk'

NOT DISRUPTIVE, BUT DANGEROUS

Your 500 Words ("Knock and Walk," WW, Feb. 4, 1998) on the police shooting
over some marijuana plants defended maniacally by an overarmed,
trigger-happy citizen overlooks some fine points of the "Let us in the
house for a little look, please" policy.

Portland police sometimes have flimsy reasons to waltz into a private home
and look for drugs: Two months ago, two narcotics plainclothes officers
asked to "look inside" our house on the basis of what they said was an
anonymous tip to a police drug tip-line. Their search was cursory at best,
and not overtly disruptive. The cops said right off they could "tell" we
don't appear to be dope growers (which was the tip they got), and added
that often the anonymous tips they follow up are erroneous because of
Police Bureau clerical error--the address is recorded wrong--a mistake from
the tipster in the address or a revenge or a prank against the house being
searched.

Whatever the tactics of the terrible shoot-out in the Dons case, the idea
of walking through a house, however politely as in our case, with nothing
but an anonymous phone call for evidence, is poor, dangerous and an
abridgement of our civil rights.

As for your comment about Dons that "it's hard to feel much concern for his
constitutional rights," he had those rights when he was confronted by
police, and he still has rights to protection under the constitution, and
zealously crossing the line of abridging his rights because of smoke from
three or four dozen plants doesn't seem worth it, in retrospect.

In our case the police were polite to us, I assume because we appeared to
be a quiet, white, middle-aged couple in a quiet, white, middle-class
neighborhood. I would assume they would not be so polite to others not
similarly situated. We let the officers into our house only because we had
nothing illegal inside and because we feared sending them back for a proper
search warrant, which under ideal circumstances they should not have been
granted because they had no probable cause except a "tip-line" call, but it
would have meant if they returned they would have pulled the house
apart--and still would have found nothing.

Keith Tillstrom, Southeast 24th Avenue