opinion noir

[ShadowRoll]

Originally Posted by Cannon Shell

I like his style. "Tougher then a three dollar steak" Very nice. Not so nice the PA Supreme Court ruling that seems unbelievable. Under their interpretation a drug dealer could sell drugs unfettered as long as he packages the drugs in a box with a bow on top that doesnt look like drugs.

The Rand Corporation did a recent study for the New York Police Department in which they examined over half a million pedestrian stops by the NYPD. The purpose of the study was to determine whether there was a racial disparity in the way the NYPD stops people on the street – there is – but the study provides some useful statistics regarding the accuracy of police suspicions. Of the blacks who were frisked or searched for suspected drug crimes (10% of all the blacks stopped), a little over 11% were found to actually have contraband. Of the whites who were frisked or searched for suspected drug crimes (15% of all the whites stopped), a little under 17% were found to actually have contraband.

That means that 89% of the blacks and 83% of the whites who were stopped, frisked or searched on suspicion of drug crimes didn’t have any drugs. You can see the results for yourself here (there’s a chart on page 11): http://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_r...RAND_TR534.pdf

The real question in that Supreme Court case (as dalakhani notes in his post) is how willing we are as a society to let our citizens be detained because a cop is suspicious (and believe me, the cops are suspicious of everybody), especially if the cops are wrong most of the time, as the Rand study suggests. It’s not the rights of criminals that are at stake, it’s the rights of everyone, including the innocent citizens going about their business who are subjected to such police intrusions.

It might gall you to think that a drug buyer (such as the defendant in the opinion noir) or even a drug seller should get off scot free, but because it’s only the cases where someone gets arrested that we hear about, it’s only the cases where someone gets arrested that something can be done to reign in the absolute power exercised by the police on the streets. And you know what they say about absolute power.