We Are the Enemy: Is This the Lesson of Ferguson?

If you dress police officers up as soldiers and you put them in military vehicles and you give them military weapons, they adopt a warrior mentality. We fight wars against enemies, and the enemies are the people who live in our cities – particularly in communities of color.
– Thomas Nolan, criminology professor and former police officer

Should police officer Darren Wilson be held accountable for the shooting death of unarmed citizen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014?

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Ferguson matters because it provides us with a foretaste of what is to come. It is the shot across the bow, so to speak, a warning that this is how we will all be treated if we do not tread cautiously in challenging the police state, and it won’t matter whether we’re black or white, rich or poor, Republican or Democrat. In the eyes of the corporate state, we are all the enemy.

This is the lesson of Ferguson. Read More

Why You Should Assert Your Rights

The following was from a recent email communication from Steve Silverman of Flex Your Rights.

On Tuesday the Court held in Rodriguez v. U.S. that suspects cannot be detained beyond the scope of a routine traffic stop for the sole purpose of performing a dog sniff. The 6-3 ruling is indeed a big win for the 4th Amendment. But our old friend and former-Flex Associate Director Scott Morgan emailed me a note about why this ruling is particularly special.

Hey Steve, Great ruling today! Of course, everyone's going to talk about the rarity of the Court upholding the 4th Amendment these days. What I noticed (and hope more people see) is that this case only happened because the suspect asserted his rights by refusing the dog sniff. It's a point I used to make frequently in the Flex Blog that SCOTUS rulings limiting 4th Amendment protections tend to arise from situations where the suspect did not assert their rights (e.g. Florida v. Bostick). Yet here's a case where the suspect did flex their rights, and look at the outcome! If anyone wonders how asserting your rights makes a difference, well ... here you go. Cheers, Scott

Great point, Scott! Anytime suspects fail to clearly invoke their 4th Amendment rights, their defense is confined to the more difficult path of articulating other procedural 4th Amendment violations. Because of the relative weakness of such arguments, courts will often find that police acted in “good faith” by executing a search they believed to be lawful. This sets bad precedent expanding the scope of legal police searches.

However, when citizens clearly assert their rights, they empower the courts to rule in their favor by setting a higher evidentiary standard necessary to override their refusal. In other words, there’s a greater likelihood for a 4th Amendment victory – which is likely to set good precedent limiting the scope of legal police searches.

I don’t know if Dennys Rodriguez has seen our videos, but when police asked him to wait around until a drug dog could sniff his vehicle, he correctly refused. If more citizens are empowered to do the same – we’ll get better cases, better rulings, and a stronger 4th Amendment.