Liberty, True Believers and How We Give Up Our Rights

Benjamin Franklin once said, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”  We have become a country in which that is happening every day, and the recent Supreme Court Decision regarding permissible warrantless entries into private residences is an example of the slippery slope to which Franklin would have almost certainly, and most strenuously, objected.

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday, in an 8-to-1 decision, that the police do not need a warrant to enter a home if they smell burning marijuana, knock loudly, announce themselves and hear what they think is the sound of evidence being destroyed.  I am not sure that the uninitiated, unsuspecting citizenry has any idea what the Supreme Court did with the stroke of 8 pens on Monday.  They opened your front door to the police who need only tell a relatively minor untruth (we call it a lie where I come from) and they can kick down your door.  You don’t think they will do it?  You have no idea what these true believers will do.  Follow the logical argument and the best you will ever be able to tell me is, “Oh, they wouldn’t do a thing like that.”  I for one, do not place my faith in that kind of blind trust.

As I indicated in a previous post, we have a group of unseen and unsuspected true believers that walk amongst us and prey on a group that is held in disdain in our society.  They prey on a group that has no real political power, nor in fact, any power at all, not even public support.  The true believers to whom I refer are the few members of police departments in our country that have developed an “us versus them” mentality.  The “us”, is cops; the “them”, is anyone that ain’t cops, but in particular, it is anyone defined by the cops as a “bad guy”.

Now before I get hate mail, and I will get hate mail, allow me to explain.  Much like the Muslims of the world who are a peaceful and tolerant group of persons, most police officers are a fine group of individuals that serve us well and are true public servants.  I refer to the dangerous “true believers” among the police that I believe are a true threat to our society, and I will explain how.  I also want to point out that, at one time, I was a police officer, so my knowledge comes from first-hand knowledge and personal experience.  Since I was once the Police Officer of the Year in the County in which I worked; I must have done something right and been halfway decent at my job as well.  Okay, moving right along…

Police officers develop a three-premise logic; premise one, “I don’t make bad arrests.”  I do not believe any but the most evil of police officers would ever deliberately, with malice and aforethought, arrest a person they know did not commit the crime for which they were being arrested.  Yes, I know it has been done, the Duke Lacrosse Team comes to mind, but I believe this to be an exception and, quite frankly, tehre is a special level of Hell resereved for those that do this.  I will not split hairs regarding those that will make a bad arrest, absolutely convinced that the bad guy may not have done this one, but he has gotten away with so many times, it is okay to make a false arrest on him this time.  This premise, “I don’t make bad arrests,” is what starts the progression and it is a relatively innocent assumption in itself, but it is what starts the ball rolling, so to speak.

The second premise is, “I only arrest dirtbags.”  Police have all sorts of cutesy phrases for persons with whom they deal; mopes, dirtbags, perps.  Use of these terms is the unfortunate, seemingly natural, psychiatric process of dehumanizing people to whom you may need to do something bad.  The most prevalent use of the process of dehumanization is in the military.  Of course, it is understandable that decent human beings, placed in a situation where they need to do inhumane things, do things that allow them to deal with what they have to do. 

In World War II, our soldiers killed Krauts, Jerries, Heinies and Rhine Monkeys, and all other names for German soldiers.  The Japanese were called Zipperheads, Nips, Slant-eyes (many of these derogatory terms were also applied to the Oriental enemies during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, along with Slope, Gook and a variety of other terms).  Anyway, we use these terms to make these people, to whom we may need to do bad things, such as kill them, different from ourselves.  We reduce their value and it is somehow more palatable to do what we must do.  In police work this would be, arrest them.

The final premise of the police logic goes, “Dirtbags don’t have rights.”  This is what allows a police officer, prone to do so, to blatantly disregard their duty and responsibility.  If you look at 90% of the police identifications and/or oaths of office, you will find that their first obligation is not, contrary to the belief of most, to arrest as many people as possible.  It is to “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and The Constitution of The State of [whatever state they are sworn in]…”  Now this would seem to mean that the police have a responsibility to protect those rights granted under the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments, in addition to all the other things, in The Constitution.  However, the police often view the Constitution of the United States to be an impediment to them doing their jobs.  They are absolutely right, it is an impediment and that is the way it was meant to be.  It is a protection against the overreaching authority of the government, but that is a civics lesson for another time.

The problem with” Dirtbags don’t have rights” is it allows the police to do anything to anybody.  Let us say that you are the one in this logical trick bag.  A police officer stops you and decides you need to be arrested.  Let us say that you are driving a rental car, you are new to an area and you run a stop sign or, having rented the car at the airport where you have just arrived, you have made a wrong turn into a “high crime” neighborhood (police code for drug sales area – generally populated by working class African-Americans).  You are pulled over and at some point the police officer asks, “Can I search your car?”  You have the choice to say, “Sure go ahead,” or “No, I think I will invoke my Right under the Fourth Amendment and tell you to get a Search Warrant.”  Regardless of what you say, the police officer asks you to step out of the car and begins to search your car, with or without your consent. 

Unfortunately, you do not know that the last renter of the car left one of their crack rocks in the ashtray.  The eagle-eyed officer sees the rock, field tests it and says the magic words,”You’re under arrest.”  The police officer makes a decision to not believe you when you say the crack isn’t yours (he hears that each and every time, by the way).  He is not making a bad arrest in his mind; he just chooses to believe that the stuff is yours.  Congratulations, you have been demoted to “dirtbag” status, and now the real fun begins.

As a new member of the dirtbag class, you now have no rights.  The police officer can do anything he wants to “get” you.  This translates to whatever is necessary to make the arrest legally valid.  If he does not like your attitude, and he won’t, because you failed to acquiesce to his authority and told him he could not search your car, he will merely write in his report that you gave him permission.  Remember, you are the bad guy accused of a crime and he is the good guy in the white hat that is arresting the bad guy.  Later you will hear the refrain, “Why would he lie?” until you cannot stand it anymore.  The reason he will lie is because he can and he believes he is allowed to do anything to you, because you are a dirtbag with no rights.  The Constitution is an impediment to him doing his job and he knows that all he has to do is lie, under oath by the way, and with the simple phrase, “Mr. so and so gave consent to search.”, he has avoided all the legal niceties regarding search warrants and such, making the drugs admissible in your felony possession of narcotics trial.

He does not think he made a bad arrest, he thinks he is doing a good thing, when, in fact, he is putting an innocent man in jail for a crime he did not commit.  I know the response of many, “This would never happen to me.”  Well, it doesn’t happen to you until it happens to you.  Let me give you another example.

Think about your absolute honor student with a heart of gold and a great future , out with a group of friends for the evening, one of whom is the bad boy or girl.  When the traffic stop occurs, the drug stash goes under your honor student’s seat and he/she gets popped with the rest of these kids for felony possession of drugs.  Cop lies, your kid’s future is ruined and for something they didn’t do.  Of course, maybe the kid actually did give consent to search and poof, future gone?

Folks, I watched this happen, that’s one of the reasons I left law enforcement.  I learned all of the tricks, all of the lies and how to prove they were just that.  I went into the private sector with these skills and learned an incredibly valuable lesson; the bad guys will pay you three times as much to keep them out of jail as the good guys will pay you to put them in jail.  Oh, you don’t have to wear a bulletproof vest and a gun to work every day, and you have reverse on your car to get out of trouble as fast as you got into it.  Yes, there are police officers that do heroic things and they are the ones running toward danger while others run away.  I salute them, but they are also sometimes the same men and women that tell that subtle lie that no one wants to say is a lie because of who they are and because we have become so scared that we are willing to give up essential liberty for temporary safety.