The Sheriff claims personal items were
notsearched, and that this was purely a routine event.
FTFY.
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While not disputing the obvious racism and illegality of the search, if you bring illegal (in that area) drugs into a place with known harsh enforcement and draconian penalties, you are simply not very bright.
Which may very well be why none of them did. As Black and women, i am certain as i can be that they were aware of the jeopardy involved in just being there.
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This fucking country. We’ve set things up so it’s essentially impossible to live a normal, engaged life without spending a fair bit of time in vehicles on public roadways, and also stripped away all freedoms and rights from people traveling on those public roadways. And left the stripping of those rights up to biased, uninformed cops.
ACAB.
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Fuckin A; weird how some folks automatically choose to jump to hypotheticals as opposed to discussing the actual events that did occur.
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That’s just not true. It was true of the original ruling in Terry v Ohio, which invoked stop and frisk, but subsequent case law has expanded the scope to traffic stops like these, and “reasonable suspicion” of any illegal activity. It’s bullshit, and I don’t like it, but that’s the current law.
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And in many places, their right to vote?
Those are the reasons for the police to stop and detain you while questioning you. But the search itself is theoretically supposed to be to search for weapons and insure the safety of the officer. Of course if drugs are found as an incidental result…Of course the reality is that in many areas, the police will stop you for the most implausible reasons and search you hoping to find money or drugs. Similarly, if they impound your car as part of a traffic stop, the search is theoretically supposed to be an inventory of property rather than a search for contraband, unless they get a search warrant. But of course once the cases are filtered through police training, bunch of poorly resources public defenders pleading everything out instead of objecting to the search, and some less than bright police we get where we are today. Lazy cops searching people for little or no reason.
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A lot of people seem to think that there is an objective thing called “legality” or “the law” that is independent of what police do. But our system is set up to justify almost everything individual cops do. The police create “legality” by doing things; if they do it, it’s legal, it’s the enforcement of the law, it’s an expression of a legal and just system.
Occasionally external pressures on the system (e.g. mass movements painstakingly built from grassroots by dedicated organizers), can lead to the system categorizing a single instance as illegitimate and punishing (or excising) an errant cop. Similarly, greater pressure can lead to tweaks to the system’s parameters. But the system remains intact and police remain the manifestation of law and order. Police actions are, de facto, legal – I’d probably argue that they are de jure legal even.
It seems vanishingly rare that it would be relevant whether police were following established legal procedure or not. I think the recent SCOTUS leak shows a very similar principle: the State can almost always find a legal precedent for justifying the violence it needs to control the citizenry, if it is allowed to.
(oops posted a draft mid-screed and deleted)
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