TheAgitator.com
Police State D.C.
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008D.C. police will seal off entire neighborhoods, set up checkpoints and kick out strangers under a new program that D.C. officials hope will help them rescue the city from its out-of-control violence.
Under an executive order expected to be announced today, police Chief Cathy L. Lanier will have the authority to designate “Neighborhood Safety Zones.” At least six officers will man cordons around those zones and demand identification from people coming in and out of them. Anyone who doesn’t live there, work there or have “legitimate reason” to be there will be sent away or face arrest, documents obtained by The Examiner show.
Lanier has been struggling to reverse D.C.’s spiraling crime rate but has been forced by public outcry to scale back several initiatives including her “All Hands on Deck” weekends and plans for warrantless, door-to-door searches for drugs and guns.
Under today’s proposal, the no-go zones will last up to 10 days, according to internal police documents. Front-line officers are already being signed up for training on running the blue curtains.
Here’s my favorite part:
Peter Nickles, the city’s interim attorney general, said the quarantine would have “a narrow focus.”
“This is a very targeted program that has been used in other cities,” Nickles told The Examiner. “I’m not worried about the constitutionality of it.”
Obviously not.
Last week, I received the following email:
I live in Eckington, a “transitional” neighborhood in northeast DC. I got a knock on the door this morning from a guy with ACORN (looks like a lefty community group that I’d never heard of) saying that DC police would be coming around shortly asking to search homes in the neighborhood for guns, and explaining we had the constitutional right to refuse, etc. He added that anything the police find they can use against you because “you never know what a friend of a friend might have left in your house” Not sure if he told me this because I had just gotten out of bed and had answered the door in my bathrobe looking disoriented, but I digress. He was handing out a packet of info from the ACLU including a nifty doorhanger you can put out that says “NO CONSENT TO SEARCH OUR HOME”. One of my neighbors told me the guy told them they were only doing this in poor black neighborhoods, and this notice from the ACLU that I found online seems to bear this out.
I know it’s not exactly a wrong-door no-knock raid, but I am concerned because while I certainly don’t want the police (or any other strangers) rummaging through my junk, I’m kind of afraid of what would happen if I refuse the search. I already live on one of those streets with the surveillance cams installed. Does my address get ‘marked’ for being uncooperative or suspicious? I should mention of course that I don’t own any guns and have never touched anything more powerful than a bb gun.
You are free to refuse the searches. But if a regular reader of this site feels uncomfortable asserting that right, you can imagine how other people subject to these searches might feel. Despite the promises of amnesty, I have a hard time believing you’re going to get off if you allow the police into your home and they find significant amounts of drugs or weapons.
Randy,
This sounds like an excellent opportunity for some civil disobediance. Simply organize a large group (50+) of people to walk into some of the “sealed off” neighborhoods. When asked why, the answer would be solely to exercise our constitutional right to move freely about the country and that if the police want to come along and walk with us, they’re welcome. I wonder if we could get some reporters to walk along?
Whatever ACORN is, they have the right idea for resisting the consent searches. It’s very difficult for just one person to stand alone against police pressure, but if a dozen or so people refuse in each block, they’ll have the strength of numbers.
Hmm. First make it illegal to keep or carry weapons, then initiate house to house searches. Might one suppose there is any connection between the two notions? I don’t believe even the most zealous lawdog would try this in say … Texas, for example.
“Hello officer, may I help you?” “Yes sir, we’d like to search your house.” “I don’t think so, not without either a warrant or a helluva lot more guys.” Castle doctrine, a lovely thing.
Thank god for DC. Whenever some brain-dead idiotic crime reduction strategy is proposed in any other city in the country, we can almost always point to DC as having tried it already with disastrous results.
Not concerned about constitutionality? WOW … who in the hell do these “police” think they are that they can control where people travel to? #1 is correct, get an number of folk together and video tape it. This is simply sickening.
There’s a video on YouTube showing ACORN and ACLU activists going door to door in DC warning individuals about police plans to seek consent to search houses for guns absent reasonable suspicion.
As well as being informative, the video’s quite entertaining:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=GLpSY8d3gRc
Additionally, I came across a legal opinion/brief a year or so back written by a DOJ attorney where he was trying to sell the ‘legality’ and Constitutionality of these proposed neighborhood checkpoints. Looks like they’ve gone from the planning stages to the implementation stage….
The real question is what are freedom loving Americans going to do about it?
I’ll try and find the document again. If I do, I’ll post a link here along with a blog entry to my website.
Why not use these tactics here? They’ve worked so well for us in Baghdad.
DC is proof positive that if you saturate an area with enough politicians, the collective intellect drops into the single digits. If they can’t keep drugs out of a small, controlled access, heavily patrolled, high security prison, how can they possibly think it can be done for a whole country? Do they actually have to reduce the country to a prison before the inevitability of failure finds its way into their waking consciousness?
What makes this even worse is that most voters don’t get it either. Continuing the drug war is like repeatedly hitting yourself in the nuts with a hammer because you’ve never paused long enough to notice that it feels better if you stop.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
Just say no kids! Hey if they can use it, so can I.
Reminds me of those old WWII movies showing the Gestapo questioning people. “Ve vould like to see your papers, please…”
Anyone heard of this going on elsewhere and if it has even been challenged in the courts? I can’t imagine this is constitutional.
“At least six officers will man cordons around those zones and demand identification from people coming in and out of them.”
Demand IDs?
Holy Crap now they are going to demand we present papers, not just at the terrorist (airport) arrival, and departure gates, but on the city streets also.
“Anyone who doesn’t live there, work there or have “legitimate reason” to be there will be sent away or face arrest, documents obtained by The Examiner show.”
Who decides what is a legitimate reason?
Rookie Officer Don Uts?
Being a citizen of the US isn’t a legitimate reason for traveling on any public street that others travel on?
What probable cause would you be arrested for?
Failure to show ID is not probable cause.
Walking down a public street is not probable cause.
Standing on a sidewalk is not probable cause.
With gas at $4.00 a gallon and not wanting to drive an extra 15 miles to route yourself around “Neighborhood Safety Zones.” is not probable cause. That would be for 10 days or 300 miles coming and going.
It will not be long before land in Montana or in Seward’s Folly will start getting very expensive, as the great migration begins to escape the tyranny that is upon us.
Oh! Wait they are restricting our movement without the proper papers.
In 1961 the Berlin wall went up, I was born, and probably a bunch of other stuff happened, as well. Old black-and-white TV carrying three channels portrayed with stark vividness Churchill’s description of an “Iron Curtain” descending across eastern Europe, and today in the national capitol of the United States police are “running the blue curtains”.
I was slightly staggered when I read that and made that connection.
Oh, and Uncle Kenny? The Castle Doctrine was tested in Texas back in 1993. When the Davidians told the BATF to leave with their dead and wounded, the national government came back with a whole bunch more guys. “Don’t Mess With Texas”, indeed.
Just put the hammer and sickle on the flag already and get it over with.
I just read the entire news article at http://www.examiner.com/a-1423820~Lanier_plans_to_seal_off_rough__hoods_in_latest_effort_to_stop_wave_of_violence.html
This quote worries me as much as any. It is probably how many supporters of Hitler, or Stalin must have thought.
“The proposal has the provisional support of D.C. Councilman Harry “Tommy” Thomas, D-Ward 5, whose ward has become a war zone.
“They’re really going to crack down on what we believe to be a systemic problem with open-air drug markets,” Thomas told The Examiner.
Thomas said, though, that he worried about D.C. “moving towards a police state.” ”
So Tommy supports it, but worries that DC is becoming a police state?
How about supporting the freedoms of US citizens, and then maybe you would not worry so much Tommy.
“Anyone heard of this going on elsewhere and if it has even been challenged in the courts? I can’t imagine this is constitutional.”
I think Philadelphia was considering it along with Baltimore last year but I don’t know if either city actually implemented such a program.
With regards to the Constitutionality of such checkpoints, they’re clearly not but since when has that stopped executive branch agencies and their enablers in the judicial branch from creating 4th and 5th amendment loopholes out of thin air to justify such activity.
At one time it would have been unheard of for armed federal agents to seize vehicles along public highways inside the country at suspicionless Homeland Security checkpoints and interrogate vehicle occupants regarding their nationality while running a drug dog around their vehicle. If you live within 100 miles of an international border today however, it happens all the time.
See my videos on YouTube for proof:
http://youtube.com/CheckpointUSA
As such, suspicionless neighborhood checkpoints are just a new twist on an enforcement theme that’s been maturing for years.
Two things:
“Liberty is a harsh mistress. You cannot pick and choose what you like and dislike about her. Liberty will not change her principles for you, no matter how much you claim to love her. She will stand fast in her demands for total acceptance. If you can’t receive her, she will recognize you as a false lover and leave you. And when you hear that door slam, it will take every tear in your eye, every ounce of blood in your veins, and all the nerve in your heart to win her back.”
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
These tactics have been used before. I think the last time a government implemented them they very successfully found a 14 year old girl in an attic. Now if the DC cops can just remember to check for a diary in their searches.
Anyone heard of this going on elsewhere and if it has even been challenged in the courts? I can’t imagine this is constitutional.
During the late 80s, there were blocks in New York City that had similar restrictions on access. I think there were court challenges, but I don’t remember the details. A quick google search didn’t turn up anything.
A similar program was instituted in New York in the late 90s. Here’s one account from the time. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B07EED71331F932A15750C0A96F958260
[...] More from Ahab and Radley. [...]
This sounds exactly like the kinds of checkpoints that are implemented here in FL during natural disasters such as wildfires or hurricanes. No one goes in or out without showing ID and often you cannot get into the neighborhoods even if you CAN demonstrate “legitimate business”. Granted, though, these checkpoints are generally set up after a neighborhood has been evacuated and are intended to preserve life and property, ie to prevent looting or some idiot going in to sightsee and get electrocuted by downed power lines or burned in a firestorm.
I would suspect that the only thing the DC government has to do to make this Constitutional, or to at least give it the blush of Constitutionality, is to declare some kind of “state of emergency” in these neighborhoods. That generally gives the police state a much greater latitude in restriction of residents’ movement.
Since I know it’s not clear from the tone of my above post, let me just say that this plan makes me sick to my stomach. I’ve long suspected we already live in a police state which has effectively hidden its iron hand in a velvet glove of “for your own safety and that of your children”. If they manage to implement this plan, that will simply be the proof of my fears.
Did I miss something, they’re going to assign six officers to man check points, why not just have the six officers patrol this designated area all day? Wouldn’t the prescense throughout have a much better effect?
Zones… Cordons… ID Checks…
Is this Baghdad or Washington D.C.?
Somebody must put a stop to all of those damn suicide bombers and sectarian killers driving around D.C.!!!!
I am not an attorney. However, I was in the Bronx when the NYPD set up the program on which the DC Police is basing their Trinidad neighborhood roadblock program. That program was litigated up to the C of A level, but not, IIRC, to SCOTUS.
The police must go through normal warrant procedures for a home search. The ACLU, therefore, may be a bit alarmist in their actions in Eckington. However, the police can legally place checkpoints and ask drivers and passengers what business they have in the Trinidad neighborhood of DC. Drivers and passengers do not have to answer, or they can respond “NOYB.” However, they cannot lie when they answer the police. The police also cannot stop the drivers and passengers from going through Trinidad without cause, although they can take down the vehicle’s plate number and do a plate check.
If the law-abiding citizenry of those rough, gang-infested neighborhoods were allowed to defend themselves with handguns, perhaps the police would not have to resort to extreme measures like those the NYPD used.
BTW, your reader is rightly concerned about being on the police’s s-list. There might be a probability that the police go back to a court for a warrant to search the home. Probable cause is up to the judge before whom the warrant application is placed.
chsw (DC native, ex-Chicagoan, NYer since mid 1980’s)
chsw, the article claims that “Anyone who doesn’t live there, work there or have “legitimate reason” to be there will be sent away or face arrest, documents obtained by The Examiner show.”
So “none of your business” would apparently not be an “acceptable” response in the DC program.
I don’t know why, but the ID check bothers me the most. What if you have no ID? I am sure there are a lot of people in these troubled neighborhoods who do not drive.
Nothing, because there are too few such Americans left anymore. Most Americans are happy being sheep.
I think this is the sort of situation for which the word “gobsmacked” was made.
I particularly enjoy Megan McArdle’s take on this:
“I hope that when the police ask for their papers, people will hand them a copy of the Bill of Rights too.”
Here’s a few additional links associated with this story:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/04/AR2008060402205_pf.html
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/DC_checkpoint_plan_latest_police_state_0604.html
According to the Washington Post article, the police are really planning on playing hard ball & will arrest anyone who fails to ‘cooperate’ with their demands for identification and an explanation for daring to drive along a public street:
“‘In certain areas, we need to go beyond the normal methods of policing,’ Fenty (D) said at a news conference announcing the action. ‘We’re going to go into an area and completely shut it down to prevent shootings and the sale of drugs.’
The checkpoint will stop vehicles approaching the 1400 block of Montello Avenue NE, a section of the Trinidad neighborhood that has been plagued with homicides and other violence. Police will search cars if they suspect the presence of guns or drugs, and will arrest people who do not cooperate, under a charge of failure to obey a police officer, officials said.
The enforcement will take place at random hours and last for at least five days in Trinidad, with the option of extending it five more days. Checkpoints could be set up in other neighborhoods if they are requested by patrol commanders and approved by Lanier.”
I figure if these enforcement operations aren’t challenged & squashed in their infancy, we can expect to see them in every major city across the country in five years or so.
[...] Radley Balko writes: [...]
Found this gem in the Washington Post:
“The checkpoint will stop vehicles approaching the 1400 block of Montello Avenue NE … Police will search cars if they suspect the presence of guns or drugs, and will arrest people who do not cooperate, under a charge of failure to obey a police officer, officials said.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/04/AR2008060402205.html
How could this possibly legal? Last I checked, probable cause is required to search a vehicle…
RE: Marten & Bill & JakeR
Just because a policeman gives an order does not necessarily make it a lawful order. Lots of protesters and onlookers in DC are arrested for failure to “move along.” They are almost always released after a few hours and before arraignment on any charge. This is because the arrest may have been of dubious legality (although sometimes the dismissal is because of the sheer volume of arrestees, even though there may be probable cause for several of them).
And Jake - McArdle is correct. We are gradually surrendering our rights. However, we are surrendering them to both the police/state and to gangs/mobs/thugs. The country will be in for rough times no matter who is elected POTUS.
chsw
I don’t see any possible way this could be constitutional, and it put a cold shiver down my back when I first read about it. OTOH, I don’t live in those neighborhoods, nor would I likely be traveling thru them and I read that the people that actually do live in them or travel thru them are all for it. Perhaps they are tired of being killed and are willing to put up with this.
I agree with you, chsw. it’s interesting that the article Terry quoted said the arrest would be for “failure to obey a police officer” rather than “failure to obey a lawful order”, as it’s usually constructed.
I have come to believe that one major reason we haven’t already seen major unrest over the abuse of police power in this country is that too many people believe that they have “too much to lose”. So it is very dangerous for police to ramp up the misuse of their power at the same time the economy seems to be going downhill.
//I have come to believe that one major reason we haven’t already seen major unrest over the abuse of police power in this country is that too many people believe that they have “too much to lose”.//
If things slip too much farther, people will realize that they’ll lose everything if they don’t act, and decide that–since they’re likely to lose everything regardless–they’d rather be the ones to choose the time and place.
If someone breaks into your house and claims to be a policeman but offers you no opportunity to confirm that, is the person more likely to be:
-1- A burglar or robber
-2- A cop who is breaking in legitimately
-3- A burglar or robber who’s on the government payroll
In case #1, shoot the intruder. In case #2, don’t shoot. In case #3? You’ll probably end up dead if you shoot the crook, but if you accede to the government the power to do as it likes to you without cause and without retribution, what would you have left that was worth living for?
Unfortunately, not enough people acknowledge the government burglars and robbers for what they are. Hopefully that will change before the country drifts too far toward totalitarian anarchy.