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The right of the people to be secure in their persons,
houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches
and seizures, shall not be violated
— Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge
the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States;
nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty,
or property, without due process of law
— Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

It is an interesting read when a police officer, makes commentary on how a major program of our government is an assault on the basic rights of individuals.

In this case, the article is by Russ Jones, a police officer with more than 30 years experience. When I read the article I couldn’t help remember another book that described things and gave reasons, as well as all the quotes on rights and privacy, and that made me wonder. Were the reasons the same?

Mr Jones full article can be found here Nightmare in Lima, Ohio

It has been 220 years since the Bill of Rights. Our nation’s founders would be disappointed with what we have done to their legacy in the last 40 years with the war on drugs. By its very nature, the war on drugs is a war on the Bill of Rights. That was most evident in what occurred in Lima, Ohio, on Jan 5, 2008.

The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail — its roof may shake — the wind may blow through it — the storm may enter — the rain may enter — but the King of England cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of that ruined tenement.
Sir William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, on the right of an Englishman to be secure in his home (1763)

Prior to the war on drugs, law enforcement executed search warrants with police officers dressed in their normal, readily recognizable uniforms. They knocked on the front door and announced their presence and purpose. They then waited for someone to come to the door. Only if it was clear that someone was attempting to evade, was present and refusing to open the door, or no one was home did they force entry.

Today, police on narcotic search warrants are dressed in black SWAT uniforms, often wearing ski masks, looking more like military commandos than officers out to protect and serve. Without warning, they set off stun and flash grenades and simultaneously break out windows, knock down doors and burst in with automatic weapons at the ready.

As many as 40,000 such raids occur each year in the U.S. bringing unnecessary violence and provocation to small time nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. These raids have resulted in hundreds of needless deaths and injuries, not only to drug offenders, but to bystanders, children, police officers and suspects later found to be innocent. See http://www.cato.org/raidmap/

From another famous older work on “arrests”…

The kind of night arrest described is, in fact, a favorite, because it has important advantages. Everyone living in the apartment is thrown into a state of terror by the first knock at the door. The arrested person is torn from the warmth of his bed. He is in a daze, half-asleep, helpless, and his judgment is befogged. In a night arrest the State Security men have a superiority in numbers; there are many of them, armed, against one person who hasn’t even finished buttoning his trousers. During the arrest and search it is highly improbable that a crowd of potential supporters will gather at the entrance.

The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man’s spiritual nature, of his feelings, and of his intellect.

They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure, and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations.

They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the one most valued by civilized men.

To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Justice Louis D. Brandeis, dissenting in Olmstead v. United States (1928)

They operate according to a large body of theory, and innocence must not lead one to ignore this. The science of arrest is an important segment of the course on general penology and has been propped up with a substantial body of social theory.

Arrests are classified according to various criteria: nighttime and daytime; at home, at work, during a journey; first-time arrests and repeats; individual and group arrests. Arrests are distinguished by the degree of surprise required, the amount of resistance expected (even though in tens of millions of cases no resistance was expected and in fact there was none).

Arrests are also differentiated by the thoroughness of the required search; by instructions either to make out or not to make out an inventory of confiscated property or seal a room or apartment; to arrest the wife after the husband and send the children to an orphanage, or to send the rest of the family into exile, or to send the old folks to a labor camp too.

The growth of drug-related crime is a far greater evil to society as a whole than drug taking. Even so, because we have been seduced by the idea that governments should legislate for our own good, very few people can see how dangerously absurd the present policy is.
-John Casey

In Lima, Ohio, police used similar tactics where they knew children were present. The results were that an unarmed Theika Wilson, a mother of 6, was killed and her 1 year old child, held in her arms, seriously wounded. Both were shot by police who had rushed into the home to insure that no one destroyed any evidence, small as it may be.

Chief Garlock said that these dangerous situations occur “when a high risk search warrant is executed.” This was not a high risk search warrant because of some small time drug user, part time drug dealer, who had a small amount of cocaine and marijuana.

This was a dangerous situation because the police were uniformed, equipped, trained, and expected to act as if this was a war on people; which is exactly what the war on drugs has become. The Chief and the Mayor offered their condolences. The nation shrugs and Mrs. Wilson and her baby are chalked up as collateral damages in this war.

Milton Friedman said in 1990 that “Every friend of freedom . . . must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the U.S. into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.” His nightmare became a reality in Lima, Ohio.

What was it that Stalin said? “To murder one is a trajedy, to murder a million, a statistic”

You make men love their government and their country by giving them the kind of government and the kind of country that inspire respect and love; a country that is free and unafraid, that lets the discontented talk in order to learn the causes of their discontent and end those causes, that refuses to impel men to spy on their neighbors, that protects its citizens vigorously from harmful acts while it leaves the remedies for objectionable ideas to counter-argument and time.
-Zecharian Chafee, Jr

Oh, and the source of blockquote writing other than Russ Jones was courtesy of
The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
(New York, NY: Perennial, 2002)

The privacy and dignity of our citizens [are] being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen — a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a [person’s] life.
-Justice William O. Douglas