"Sobriety checkpoints" are sinister and a threat to liberty

Totalitarianism in action

Here’s hoping you didn’t start off your New Year with a 3am detention at a totalitarian police state “sobriety checkpoint” courtesy of fascists with badges and guns. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything as disturbing and infuriating as driving through one of these checkpoints which I did a few years back. I had known they existed, but only when I experienced one for myself did I truly realize just how creepy they are. There I was, driving with two friends when we found ourselves in a small traffic jam on a main roadway heading out of town. The cause? Jack-booted thugs stopping anyone and everyone, jamming flashlights in the faces of unsuspecting motorists trying to determine if any of us were wasted.

“Where are you coming from?” a cop barked at us.

“A restaurant,” I said, flabbergasted.

He shined the light on each of our faces before telling us, “Go ahead.”

Up until that unsettling experience, the thought of roadway checkpoints was largely an alien concept to me. For me the word “checkpoint” conjured an image of a dirt road guarded by paramilitary types with Kalishnakovs slung over their shoulders in some faraway Third World authoritarian shithole. No more. Arbitrary roadblocks set up by men with guns are right here in the “land of the free” and they’re here to stay.

That’s because in 1990, the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of sobriety checkpoints in Michigan Department of State Police v. Sitz. In that ruling, SCOTUS ruled that checkpoints are just fine. Who cares if motorists who have committed no crime are detained without probable cause by armed wards of the state? It’s only the Fourth Amendment at stake.

If you ever find yourself at a sobriety checkpoint, you can limit the amount of time you’re detained by fully answering all of the police’s questions. I would recommend this course of action if you’ve been drinking. Calmly answer the questions and maintain eye contact. Police are trained to interpret evasiveness as a sign of guilt. Of course, if you’re hammered and have glossy, bloodshot eyes and Wild Turkey breath you’re probably done for.

Or if you haven’t been drinking, you can stick it to the cops while staying within your rights as a citizen. Under the law, police may stop you at a roadblock whose purpose is to weed out drunk drivers and under the law you must stop for them. But you have the right to refuse to answer their questions. Remember: under no circumstances are you required to answer the questions of police officers. Of course, refusing to answer a simple question like, “Where are you coming from?” will arouse an officer’s suspicions, but if you haven’t been drinking and feel like asserting your constitutional rights, I would advise saying something like,

“Officer, while I understand that this checkpoint is lawful according to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Michigan State Police v. Sitz, I am choosing to exercise my constitutional rights and respectfully decline to answer whatever questions you have. Furthermore, I will decline to furnish my license and registration upon request, unless that request is pursuant to my being cited for a moving violation. If there is nothing else, I would like to proceed to my destination.”

After saying this, the cop will either let you proceed or ask you to pull over to the side of the road. If you haven’t been drinking, he should let you go. But if he tells you to pull over, then you’ve got a real asshole on your hands who doesn’t know the law and who doesn’t like to have his authority questioned.

The good news is, this is the point at which successful lawsuits against police departments begin! Just remain calm and polite. Let the police be the ones to get out of control. After all, a police officer’s worst enemy is a citizen who knows his rights.

The Sitz decision is one of the most outrageous rulings in recent Supreme Court history. Sobriety checkpoints are yet another instance of travelers being treated as suspects first, and citizens second. Take the Transportation Security Administration’s naked porno scanners in airports. If you want to fly out of Logan where I live, you have to get scanned or groped by a government bureaucrat. Those are the options you have if you want to get on a plane. Not because you’ve done anything wrong, but because you’re traveling and therefore have no rights. They’ve even started performing pat-downs on bus riders and using dogs to sniff travelers’ luggage for everything from bombs to drugs. And of course, in the big cities police continue to randomly search the bags of subway passengers. In the United States, if you travel by automobile, air, bus, train, or subway, you are guilty until proven innocent.

This is the country we’re living in right now. It’s only going to get worse. We are almost a decade removed from the World Trade Center attacks, and the American public is still so afraid of terrorists, that we’ll do just about anything merely to feel safe. Insert cliché Ben Franklin quote about liberty and security here.

- Max

max.canning@gmail.com

The Lowdown On The Police

Although the motto of police departments across the United States is “To Protect and Serve,” the men and women who populate these departments are motivated neither by a desire to protect nor to serve. However, police officers are almost universally regarded as heroes in the who voluntarily place themselves in danger to ensure the public’s safety and well-being.

In reality, the motivations of those who become cops are far less noble than the popular narrative would have us believe. We have all grown up with or gone to school with people who later went on to become part of law enforcement. Their characters vary widely just like general population: a few of them were nice, a few quite stupid, and a few of them were downright assholes with major attitude problems.

In many departments the assholes undoubtedly run the show. Emboldened by their shameless union leaders, police in Massachusetts have taken to harassing civilian flaggers at construction sites. You see, once upon a time here in Massachusetts, the state legislature thought it would be a good idea to mandate that Massachusetts become the only state in the union to require the presence of police officers at construction sites to ensure “safety.” Of course, the only thing being ensured here is the existence of an unnecessarily fat stipend paid out for performing these police details. But recently the state did away with this requirement, paving the way for civilian flaggers to direct traffic around construction sites for cheaper pay. Unfortunately, police are still used for most projects across the state, but even this is too much for cops across Massachusetts who have become accustomed to being coddled by the state. The Boston Globe describes the most recent flap on this front:

Lynn Williams, a construction worker in a yellow vest, was standing in the middle of a South Boston intersection, holding a sign warning drivers to slow down, when police showed up and ordered her to stop, she said.

“They threatened to arrest me,” she said. “Wasn’t that nice of them?”

Within moments, according to the state’s top highway official, a project supervisor had pulled Williams away from assisting traffic to “deescalate the situation.” Police deny that they threatened to arrest her, but by the next morning, the civilian flagger had been replaced by a uniformed officer.

To protect and serve.

The tension has been simmering since October 2008, when Massachusetts became one of the last states in the nation to allow civilian flaggers to work at construction sites. In the weeks after the law was passed, police in some communities taunted civilian flaggers at construction sites. In Woburn, for example, where the first civilian flagger was used, 50 off-duty officers shouted down a union-represented civilian flagger, calling him a “scab’’ and “pathetic.”

To protect and serve.

The fact that these knuckle-dragging troglodyte cops shouted “scab’’ at the civilian flagger gives the lie to the claim that the police are in the main concerned about public safety. “Scab” is a term designated for workers who cross picket lines, not a person who endangers the public. And the worst part about this most recent incident is that the construction supervisor acquiesced to police intimidation. Here we have a woman doing a job as a lawfully-sanctioned civilian flagger, who is suddenly accosted by police officers who tell her stop doing that job and that they might arrest her. What a gross violation of the public’s trust. While this nonsense was occurring, it is a guarantee that any number of crimes were being committed across the city, and yet, a few officers take it upon themselves to browbeat a flagger, who, unlike police at construction sites, may not use a cell phone while on duty, and must be outside a vehicle. Cops on the other hand, may sit inside their vehicle if they are not directing traffic. Well, what’s the point of that?

And then there is Quinn Bill here in Massachusetts. Thankfully that awful piece of legislation has been significantly rolled back, as it provided police officers with extra pay for having associate’s, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees—an absurd provision especially in this day and age where every professional is expected to have some type of degree. The police also whined about this, insisting they be paid extra. It does not matter that municipalities across Massachusetts are broke because police unions will be damned if they allow the public good to factor into their collective bargaining decisions.

Readers of this site will know that I am generally a union-friendly person, and that I decide on the merits of unions on a case-by-case basis. But the police unions of Massachusetts have shown themselves to be some of the most selfish and pig-headed organizations in the state. “Entitled” is how I would describe police in this state, and probably all states.

Should any of this come as a surprise? Many cops have significant personality issues, which is what we might expect from the vanguard of state oppression. They drive souped up cars, carry guns, tasers, clubs, and when they say “Jump,” we civilians are supposed to say, “How high?” At sobriety checkpoints where police stop motorists who have done nothing wrong to ask, “Where are you coming from?” the proper response in any decent democracy with a respect for liberty and the right of the innocent to be left alone would be, “Fuck off…officer.” Instead we are to tell him that we are coming from our regular romp at the local swingers’ club, whose theme this week was S&M, and that we’re only sorry he had missed it. Even after the officer waves you through with all due haste and dispatch, we are left to feel somewhat violated because after all, he hadn’t a right to do that. Even though the Supreme Court has ruled that sobriety checkpoints are constitutional, we citizens know better: the state may never stop us without probable cause to ask us our business.

Police should not be universally hated, but they should not be universally praised either. Cops are just like you or me, except that at some point in their lives they decided, “I wanna be a cop,” and they went through some perfunctory training and took a simple exam and were given a badge and a gun. That is the only real difference between police and civilians. That, and a psychological urge to tell other human beings what to do.

- Max