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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

There is a mindset amongst many that police should never stop, question or even talk to people without some level of suspecion of wrongdoing. They see most any checkpoint as a threat to basic libery. Such "chasers", rather than the silent watchers who dont scream at officers, are extreemists who take laws and constitutional constructions far to literally.

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That's not a mindset, that's the actual, current state of the law. Police pulling you over without cause is considered by many judges, jurists and supreme court justices to be a violation of your fourth amendment rights to privacy and your fifth amendment rights to due process. The alternative to this is stop and frisk.

Yes, the law is muddied, and yes, there are many, many exceptions... most notably those as defined in Terry v Ohio (ie, Terry stops), but even with Terry stops, officers need to have a reasonable suspicion that you're either presently armed, or should be considered dangerous enough to warrant a stop.

It isn't extremism to interpret the law as it is written, and as it is considered by many courts to be valid, that requires police to need at least some mandate to being pulled over (whether a traffic violation, exigent circumstances) more specific than "this guy was black", or "this guy was poor", or what have you.

The problem is that with qualified immunity and deference, we allow the police to get away with a lot of stops that don't even meet the legislative standards we've set, and as we allow these things to continue, from one generation to the next, the standards for what is or isn't a valid stop gets lowered.

TLDR, if a cop pulls you over just because he can, and he cannot formulate a reasonable suspicion, then he has overstepped his boundaries in the eyes of the law, even where that law seemingly has bent over backwards to accommodate arbitrary stops.

It's called probable cause and it's recognized by the courts in any other police interaction except for checkpoints.

And it's backed by the 4th Amendment, which is neither a law nor a rule. It's an acknowledgment of an innate natural right that all human beings have which includes the right to be left alone except when there's reasonable suspicion or probable cause.

Except there are limits to what constitutes Probable Cause. A cop still needs to demonstrate that there was reason to believe they had Probable Cause, and things like a person's skin color don't factor into it.

I threw the thing in about skin color not because I have any reason to believe you are racist, but because we are talking about cops, who in many areas have been shown to be quite racist, and have been shown to pull persons of color over far more than white people.

I don't think we should have checkpoints, ever, unless perhaps there is an imminent thread you are trying to stop, like a felon racing away in the car and you know she's there. In my state, Washington, I have never seen a police checkpoint. Somehow we have managed to survive up to this point

I'm genuinely surprised to learn that sobriety checkpoints are considered to violate 10 states constitutions, including Washington's. I wonder if this has any impact on the rate of impaired driving in these jurisdictions

Do you mean in the sense that "we find more impaired drivers because we look" or "we find fewer impaired drivers because of threats"? According to the top hit on Google for "washinton state dui rates" Washington is still top 10 [1]. I can't really speak to what a good source for these statistics might be, though.

[1] https://www.injurytriallawyer.com/blog/washington-state-dui-...

> "There is a mindset amongst many that police should never stop, question or even talk to people without some level of suspecion of wrongdoing."

Or in other words not be harassed. This is also pretty well covered by the fourth amendment.

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