To Serve and Protect … Or Harass and Collect?

Eric Peters
Lew Rockwell

What good are cops, really?

I mean to the average, non-violent citizen just trying to go about his business?

For him, cops are a nuisance – and increasingly, a threat. They don't protect his property; indeed, they spend their days trying to take it away via enforcement of various and ever-increasing laws ranging from the minor ("speeding" fines) to the major (asset seizure for possessing or imbibing some substance the State has arbitrarily decreed to be "illegal"). Or maybe they're out enforcing "free speech zones" and/or giving wood shampoos to the Mundanes (that's Will Grigg's wonderful term – full credit given here).

Libertarian writers such as Grigg, among others, have noted that most of us – very tellingly – do not feel "safe" when a cop rolls up behind us. Or when we see one in general. In fact we feel nervous and stressed – because we know instinctively that the cop is most emphatically not our "protector." We gird our loins, grit our teeth. We hope the cop will "give us a break" – that is, decline to fully enforce the ukase he believes we've just transgressed. We become servile, mewling "yes sir, no sir" to some buzz-cut 24-year-old community college graduate (a few have managed to achieve the full four-year degree in "criminal justice" or some such from Turnpike Tech), hating the sound of ourselves as we grovel but knowing that we must grovel, else risk our "protector's" largely unaccountable wrath.

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Court doesn't say if it will hear NJ man's appeal

Dees Illustration

Mark Sherman
Yahoo/AP

WASHINGTON – Albert Florence was strip-searched twice in seven days in two New Jersey jails after he was arrested on a warrant for a traffic fine he had already paid.

Florence said he should never have been ordered to undress for the searches, much less been arrested. He sued over his treatment, but a divided panel of federal appeals court judges in Philadelphia said that it is reasonable to search everyone being jailed, even without suspicion that a person may be concealing a weapon or drugs.

Most other federal courts have ruled otherwise, and now Florence is asking the Supreme Court to take his case. The high court will decide in the next few weeks whether to hear his appeal.

The Constitution's Fourth Amendment does not prohibit all searches, just those determined to be unreasonable. Florence argues that even if his arrest were valid — everyone agrees it was not — the jailhouse searches were unreasonable because he was being held for failure to pay a fine, which is not a crime in New Jersey.

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Police brutality against Col. Ann Wright and Daniel Ellsberg at Free Bradley Manning Protest (Video)

Youtube


RELATED:
Obama: Torturer-in-Chief

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