Why the ‘wet tea leaves’ drug raid was outrageous
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
I will confess an error in my thinking, in that it's really hard to legally define what I describe, if not impossible. But, as the bible says (paraphrased, and this is probably the first time I've ever quoted it..) "I would not destroy the city if there is a single innocent inside of it." If you can't make the law work, than maybe it shouldn't be there.
Let's rephrase this a bit:
> I mean, if it's a warehouse with criminals doing illegal things in there, then yes, a raid makes sense.
Currently much of the drug trade is managed by criminals, and once you're breaking drug laws you might as well go ahead and break other laws e.g. human trafficking, extortion, etc. But that need not be the case, and it's not hard to imagine a warehouse with "massive ammounts [sic] of drugs in-out", where a raid would be totally unjustified and illegal.
The underlying causes of addiction are medical, psychological, and social, and fixing those is the solution.
Criminal drug prohibition harms everyone. It harms non-addict drug users in an obvious way: by punishing them for a completely voluntary non-crime. It harms addicts by punishing them for having a psychological health problem that should be treated, and the follow-on effects of criminal prosecution further damage their lives (e.g. having a felony) which in turn causes them to be more likely to suffer from further addiction. Finally, it harms society by creating a massive off-the-books profit center for criminals that in turn increases crime and promotes corruption. (I call it the "federal subsidy for organized crime.") It also wastes police resources that could otherwise be available for pursuing more pressing problems.
If drugs are legal, why would organized crime continue to be involved?
I strongly disagree however with your first point, 'Addiction is a symptom of other underlying psychological or neurological problems, not a cause'. You are implying that all addictions start with a psychological or neurological problem. Let's take smoking addiction as an example. In the 60's, almost 50% of the adult population in the USA was smoking. Even today almost 20% is. Not all of those people started because of some underlying mental problem. Other factors such as group pressure, role models or just plain boredom are much more important, whether it is for nicotine, alcohol or any other addiction.
Furthermore, addiction can definitely be a cause to both psychological and neurological problems. The first one, psychological problems because of an addiction, is obvious. But recent discoveries have shown that certain drug addictions (e.g cocaine) also modify your brain structure.
One possible way to flip the debate might be to re-frame it as police "War on the Constitution". I'm not sure if it will work, or if there's better wording, but the author tries to do it in the article:
"The Fourth Amendment was a response to the invasive, sometimes violent searches of colonists’ homes by British soldiers armed with general warrants to look for untaxed goods."
However, I think it's important to consider this in context. There have been multiple recent scandals in which US law enforcement was found to rely on supposedly-scientific evidence which was, in fact, nothing more or less than fraud upon the courts. (For example https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-fo... and http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-crimelab-massachusetts...). These scandals would have been easily prevented by the ordinary scientific practice of using control samples, so the fact that they weren't prevented indicates systematic bad practices.
And there are widely-known deceptive practices still in use. For example, police bring "drug-sniffing" dogs with them, which bark whenever an officer cues them to, and courts accept this as though it were probable cause for a search.
Plaintiffs filed this action against various defendants alleging violations of 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for unlawful search, unreasonable execution of the search and excessive force in violation 2 of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. Plaintiffs also assert a claim for municipal liability under Monell v. Department of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658 (1978). Finally, plaintiffs assert numerous state law claims against defendants, including trespass, assault, false arrest, abuse of process, intentional infliction of emotional distress and false light/invasion of privacy. This matter is presently before the court on defendants’ motions for summary judgment on all of plaintiffs’ claims. As explained in more detail below, defendants’ motions are granted in their entirety.
As my dance instructor might have said... they seem to have taken a holistic approach (to their lawsuit | to dance) in an effort to achieve better results.
> After spending $25,000 to get a judge to order the Johnson County Sheriff’s Department to turn over documents related to the search and investigation leading up to it...
How is this legal? I cannot believe that this is a satisfactory level of probably cause needed for the police to start digging through people's trash and raiding their homes. It's incredible. On that note, I don't believe for a second that there even was marijuana in the trash before they searched for it.
"If you don't let me search your car, I'm going to call in a dog ..." "Officer, the Supreme Court ruled in People vs Rodriguez (2015) that a traffic stop becomes unlawful if it is prolonged beyond the time reasonably required to complete the mission of issuing a ticket for the violation."
Of course, making such an argument at the time might be unwise, but at least you know that the law is on your side if you decide to decline the search.
The OP basically has emails/internal communication basically stating they want drug users to "fear" 4/20 in their communities.
It is a campaign of terror.
> Thanks again to all of you who worked on this. I think for a first time even this was absolutely an outstanding success. The media coverage was 99% positive on this which is pretty darn good as well. We’ve had a lot of suggestions for this operation next year, such as having a telethon type billboard with a large green marijuana plant filling up as the pledges come in, making T-Shirts and whatnot. One agency had the observation that if this continues for a couple years 4/20 will be something to fear rather than something to celebrate.
> The press release sent out the morning of April 20 announced that police would be targeting 375 houses across both Kansas and Missouri. But Wingo later reported that police found just 52 marijuana grows. That’s better than single digit number of grows found in 2012. But it also means that more than 300 households were wrongly targeted.
Notice how, of the 300+ people wrongly targeted, no one complained in a substantial way?
The police, quite literally, are used to suffering no consequences for ridiculous rates of error.
Similarly, every single time they make an arrest its noted as a positive performance of their job duties. Its simple incentives built into the way the officers are reviewed like that that drive this. [e.g. If you view your job is to make arrests, you make arrests.]
Evidence of illegal contraband in trash is almost by definition probable cause for a search warrant, and judges tend to be okay with handing out a few false positive warrants. Assuming that the police are professional and the citizens are cooperative, the damage is usually relatively minor.
This seems to be less a case of rules failing and more a case of common sense breaking down. Wasting an officer's time someone's trash because you once saw them leave a gardening store isn't illegal, it's just a dumb waste of resources. And serving the resulting search warrant with a SWAT team is the kind of risk-averse cover-your-ass common sense violation that legal remedies tend to make worse instead of better.
So just make it like Halloween. Have the kids dress in police uniforms and go door to door with the actual officers searching every single house in the county. Have the adults give out marijuana-shaped candy. Say "pot or arrest" as you knock on the house. Have a competition at the end and declare the kid with the weightiest bag of "pot" the winner and give him/her a medal. Go all the way. It's good publicity you're after, not actual police work, after all.
It's unfortunate that police are the only ones allowed to use the "ignorantia juris" defense.
http://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/criminal-j...
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article24...
Or exists.
Philip Dick had an empathy test to detect androids - they did not show compassion towards cute animals in trouble. We have a similar problem here, if a person chooses to side with federal judges and the police versus public, we have an alarming creature on our hands.
If that point of view is incomprehensible to you, then perhaps you're the one who needs a Voight-Kampff test.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilians
Disclaimer: I do not believe in these, but I think this is what was being referenced.