The Washington Post reports that cops are using sobriety checkpoints for purposes that have nothing to do with drunken driving.

Lisa Davis had done nothing wrong. She was wearing a seat belt, was obeying the speed limit and produced a valid driver’s license when D.C. police pulled her over one recent night at a traffic safety checkpoint in a crime-plagued neighborhood.

Even so, an officer jotted down some basic information before letting her go, including her name, address and the time and location of the stop for a police database used for crime solving.

[...]

The details about Davis and the stop will be fed into the database, which is linked to a computer that includes arrest records and mug shots of criminals. The database allows a detective, for example, to enter into the computer the description of a car that fled a crime scene in hopes of finding a match from a traffic checkpoint.

The city’s practice of recording information at traffic safety checkpoints on violators and law-abiding motorists alike — and sometimes their passengers — has garnered little attention since police began entering such data into a computer in 2002. Few, if any, of the more than 100 people pulled over almost nightly at the five or six checkpoints in high-crime areas realize that their names and whereabouts will end up in the database.

As Lawrence Taylor points out, in Michigan vs. Sitz, the case that said checkpoints passed constitutional muster, the Supreme Court conceded that such stops constituted a “search” as defined by the Fourth Amendment, but okayed them anyway because of the threat to public safety posed by drunken driving (a threat that was overblown by inflated statistics, BTW).

Seems to me that randomly stopping motorists, collecting personal information from them even if they’ve done nothing wrong, entering that information into a database, then sending them on their way would fail to satisfy Sitz.

But given the way the Supreme Court has ruled on freedom of movement and search issues lately, I’m guessing that should the DC police tactics be challenged, Rhenquist and company would find a way to approve them.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005 at 12:16 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.