When I wrote recently that a house divided against itself cannot stand, the Banker & Tradesman editor slammed me up against a wall and frisked me.
Is that legal? I can’t get a straight answer out of Human Resources. The general counsel told me stop-and-frisk laws are so weird that I would be collecting my $25 per month Banker & Tradesman pension long before the case wandered through various levels of appellate mystery.
The editor says he had “reasonable suspicion” that I had committed a plagiarism crime – and that he was justified in his search for a copy of some Abraham Lincoln speech.
I don’t know what he’s talking about. I was just explaining that by the time all the competing interior designers and architects and construction types had their way with fancy new residential construction, sometimes the whole thing comes falling down with decorative and support beams all over the place – which is why a house divided against itself cannot stand.
The editor was wrong, as is so often the case. This is Massachusetts; you just can’t go around frisking people on vague suspicions that they might be on the verge of pulling out a Lincoln speech and freeing the slaves in the newsroom.
This summer, the Supreme Judicial Court made it fairly clear that even cops can’t go around frisking people – even moderately creepy people – without a good excuse.
Two guys in Dorchester, in separate incidents, had been stopped by cops, questioned, and patted down, in the absence of evidence that they had committed or were in the act of committing a crime. To the surprise of, probably, no one at all, both guys were found to be carrying loaded guns.
Yes, the police who wander the mean streets of Boston looking for love are pretty good at sniffing out the bad guys, whether or not they are wearing signs that say, “We are bad guys.”
The high court wasn’t buying it, tossing the weapons convictions, because “police officers may not escalate a consensual encounter into a protective frisk absent a reasonable suspicion that an individual has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a criminal offense and is armed and dangerous.”
In these particular cases, of course, the police were two-for-two, finding guns in the possession of both guys, suggesting that the cops had an accurate “suspicion,” if not a “reasonable” suspicion.
On the other hand, the civil liberties folks have a point: We risk open season on the self-esteem of young guys in bad neighborhoods if the cops are free to stop-and-frisk at will.
Good Cause?
The various judicial decisions over the years on such stuff have been murky and confusing, because, out there on the streets, the interactions between police and common folks can be murky and confusing.
Far removed from the gritty urban streets, even the corporate folks have done battle in legal cases to avoid a buttoned-down version of stop-and-frisk – “fishing expeditions” by government cops running amok through company documents – prompting similar, peculiar judicial opinions that discourage, but don’t quite prohibit, such mucking around without good cause.
As recently as 1970, the U.S. Supreme Court was embroiled in an “important,” but excruciating case mulling whether cops could search a car, without a warrant, after the arrest of the driver – a sort of stop-and-frisk of an inanimate object. The cops lost that one.
The cops don’t lose them all, of course. Even the most liberal, progressive judges and civil libertarians don’t want the cops to spend every scary day wondering whether suspicious folks are armed, but not actually being able to find out.
In a 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case, involving cops who frisked two guys who appeared to be casing out a store for a burglary, the high court gave the cops its blessings to frisk up a storm, when an officer “observes unusual conduct which leads him reasonably to conclude in light of his experience that criminal activity may be afoot…”
If all this smacks of a remarkable lack of precision, that’s why stop-and-frisk prompts so many trips to the appellate courts. Reasonable men may differ, but a house divided against itself cannot stand. Oops.
