Well, it might be sufficient for a cop to “run someone in,” but according to the New York State Court of Appeals (pdf), the simple act of standing on the sidewalk is not sufficient to sustain a charge.
They note that, particularly in the absence of any complaint by an aggrieved third party:
In the case in question, the defendant had also resisted arrest, but when the prosecutor tried to have that charge reinstated, the court refused, arguing that a charge of resisting arrest can only be sustained when the attempted arrest is an authorized arrest. Because the fact in this case were insufficient for an authorized arrest, there was no justification to reinstate the charge of resisting arrest.
When i was living in Baltimore, there was a whole big kerfuffle over this sort of thing. Police, in an alleged effort to curb the drug trade, arrested hundreds of people for offenses such as loitering. For the most part, these people never ended up seeing the inside of a courtroom, because the DA refused to prosecute. These arrests became such a problem that State’s Attorney Patricia Jessamy complained in public about police making arrests without probable cause.
I think these stories are indicative of certain problems with issues of law enforcement, problems that come to a head in the current discussion about Arizona. On the one hand, there are some fairly clear and unequivocal limits to police authority, and some bright lines that they are not supposed to cross in the performance on their duties. On the other hand, plenty of cops, and not just a few rogue cops, cross those lines on a regular basis, and are not held accountable for their actions in any meaningful way. The Baltimore case shows that this sort of thing can quite easily become institutionalized within a department, and that even when the DA or the courts correct the problem later on, it doesn’t change the fact that the person has been arrested and held in jail overnight. Even after frequent and persistent opposition from the State’s Attorney’s office, the police continued to make the type of arrests that Jessamy was criticizing.
While it’s possible for any law, even a good law, to be undermined by overzealous or rogue police, some laws ensure that the burden of bad policing will fall especially disproportionately on particular racial or ethnic groups within society. And this is the big problem with the Arizona law.
If you want to make an argument, make it. I’m not playing your Socratic games, especially when you ignore 95% of what i had to say in order to poke holes, by innuendo, in one particular observation.
Because the last thing a person who has to do a lot of late night driving wants to do is piss of the cops that work that shift. They always (without exception) let me go without a ticket, as I’m assuming they knew that if they pressed the “Swerving”, “Incomplete Stop”, etc. angle that I would have fought it.
I’m guessing you don’t do a lot of 3:00 AM driving in areas with a lot of nightclubs. I go years and years between being pulled over during the daytime, but was followed probably once a week late at night, and pulled over every month or two. It’s not just “my town” as I now live in a different one now and my wife, who manages a restaurant, experiences the same thing, although this town is so big that she gets it less frequently, as there are a lot more people on the road at that hour.
The difference is that the reason I was considered “suspect” was because of the hour I was out driving, not my race (I’m lilly white) or what language I’m most comfortable with. Sucks to be targetted for driving early in the morning, but it wasn’t race-based. If cops questioned everyone who wore dark clothing and a ski mask, that would be one thing. If they questioned only blacks who wore dark clothing and a ski mask, that would be something entirely different, and far worse, in my opinion.
While true it is not enough to sustain a charge, it is enough to run someone in. And then, in the course of running them in, check their nationality. It’s the kind of scam that cops all over the country use to allow them to perform other tasks.
Cops lie about stuff like this all the time. And it’s your word against theirs. Sure, maybe one guy will be able to appeal it, but that’s one of a thousand.
The burden of crack cocaine laws, and drug laws generally, falls disproportionately on black people in the United States. (Hispanics too, actually, but not to the same degree.) The arrest and conviction statistics are wildly out of proportion to every other indicator of drug use and dealing across racial categories – we’re talking factors of ten. Because of this overwhelming evidence, the debate is primarily over the reason for the disparity, rather than its existence.
The best case scenario put forward by people who don’t believe the drug war is racist is that the racial disparities are a function of black drug users and dealers being easier to catch. Unlike white users and dealers, this theory goes, black users and dealers operate out in the open, on street corners and in housing projects (where they have fewer Fourth Amendment rights). Even if you buy this explanation, and there are many reasons to doubt it, it still requires us to not have a problem with arrests and convictions of black people in hugely disproportionate numbers and the ensuing devastation that this has on those communities for no legitimate criminal justice reason save mere thrift.
Crack cocaine is an especially pernicious example because the former federal sentencing exposed primarily black users to sentences 100 times greater than the primarily white users of powder cocaine, based on fictional accounts of crack cocaine being more addictive and on an a fictional epidemic of “crack babies” that was inflated, if not entirely invented by the same people who brought the GOP the Southern Strategy.
I defy anyone to take an open-minded look at the social science research on drug use, dealing, and jailing and conclude that there isn’t something terribly unjust with our current drug enforcement policy.
What does this say about the legality or prudence of Arizona’s immigration law?
What made this article hit annoyingly hard for me was that I just read Satan’s Circus. A historical nonfiction book about the Charlie Becker murder case. Turn of the century New York. Same thing happening. Cops picking up random people to inflate their numbers and look good, then letting them go.
Another point worth making in the discussion of whether this law opens the door to abuse is that the exclusionary rule is not generally applied in immigration cases (though there are exceptions for coercion and excessive force in most circuits). So, unlike ordinary criminal law, there is no built-in prophylactic against local cops violating the Fourth Amendment in an effort to deport illegal aliens. To me, that’s one more reason we want a professional trained force of federal border control agents and Immigrations enforcement people to be enforcing our complex immigration laws.
I thought they were only for the prevention of disease! Where can I get the kind that protects me from local cops? Does it have to be built in, or are there portable models available?
The disparities in crack/powder cocaine sentences would have been my own first line of argument in this case, but your other points (some of which i hadn’t thought of) are equally persuasive, and i do agree with your general point about drug law enforcement.
More importantly, for the purposes of this debate, i think Bricker’s question was largely pointless because it implied, if i agreed that his statement was fair, that this would somehow negate or dilute my argument against the Arizona law. The fact that there are other unfair laws and methods of law enforcement on the books does not change the way that i feel about this particular law. The fact that some laws already disproportionately target certain racial and ethnic groups doesn’t make it OK to enact a new law that does the same thing.
So far as I’m aware, notwithstanding the self-evident injustice you say permeates our drug enforcement policy, the courts have consistently upheld the sentencing guidelines at issue.
So my analogy is obvious: why, in this case, is the claimed racial disparity sufficient cause for the Arizona law to be scuttled by the courts, when an equally egregious scheme has been upheld?
This post can stand as Exhibit #4,219 in the Bricker textbook.
I have never once said that there is sufficient cause for it to be struck down. In fact, i explicitly stated, in a recent post, that i’m not qualified to make a case for or against its unconstitutionality.
I have argued that it is a bad law, and that it will likely lead to racial profiling. I have never once made an argument about its constitutionality, nor made an argument about what might constitute “sufficient cause for the Arizona law to be scuttled by the courts.”
OK, fair enough. Surely you’ll agree that others have suggested that the courts strike down this law, and inferred that the racial disparity was reason to do so. I acknowledge that you are not making this argument.
I don’t agree that it’s a bad law, and I argue that the racial profiling that may result is no more egregious than we routinely tolerate in other segments of the law enforcemet world, so opposing this law on that basis makes little sense to me.
