On the contrary, I asked you for specific support for your contention. You may have missed that request, so I’ll repeat it here:
FWIW, my butt is just fine, but thank you for asking; to continue your vulgar metaphor, your offering is barely noticeable, much less painful.
To cavil slightly at what you said, while I must say I admire your eloquent analysis of Bricker’s analytical techniques at work here, he has in fact conceded several points, including that there are a lot of bad cops out there who will not abide by the technical standards he had just outlined. So, credit where credit is due, huh? He’s noted for his ability to focus in on the technical justifictions, especially when they benefit the positions his party takes, but he’s quite well aware that they don’t exist in a vacuum, and in the real world, shit happens.
Well, I have plenty of experiences as well: years of cross-examing police officers on the stand as to their versions of events.
Did cops lie? Sure. But it was not very frequent. Why should they? As a general rule, they could follow the rules and still get plenty of arrests and convictions, because their training and experience was more than enough to outmatch the generally witless street offenders they were matched against. They didn’t need to manufacture cause to stop a car with a Grateful Dead sticker, because a moment’s time spent tailing that car would give them a legitimate traffic violation. Dashboard cameras were just beginning to be used during my tenure, and they always confirmed the officer’s story.
Now, when a particular officer weould choose to lie, and again, there were a few, the same kinds of things would happen. Their partners would suddenly be “uanble to observe” or “unable to recall” despite being five feet away from where the disputed activity ocurred. It’s true that I never saw a cop come out and say another officer was lying, but there was always an extreme reluctance to join the party. Judges saw tese same officers every day, and it wouldn’t take long before skepticism from the bench became evident. Again, this never took the form of “I do not credit Officer So-and-so’s testimony,” but it manifested itself in all sorts of ways. Pro-forms motions to dismiss would sudddenly be granted. Suppression motions would be granted. Judges would become very reluctant to accept such tainted testimony and would find ways to scuttle it.
So, with all due respect to your backyard barbeque view of the profession, I had a front-row seat to how these things actually played out in a courtroom. I lost many cases; it’s the lot of a PD. I don’t think I can attribute a single trial guilty verdict to an officer’s lies. (Well, maybe one. No more).
Out of curiosity, do you think your experience is generalizable to the entire nation? My impression is that police departments, like all organizations, can be shaped hugely by their leadership. If a good person is in charge of a police department, they’re likely to maintain it as a professional, honest work environment, and the number of bad cops is likely to be a minimum. If a bad person is in charge (as we had locally–our old sheriff will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars for one of his many sins), you’re likely to have a corrupt department in which cops who lie and who bend the rules are rewarded and not punished, and where honest, professional cops become disgusted and seek better work environments.
That’s a fair point. But this isn’t the 1930s – a department that routinely encouraged perjury in an era that includes a readily-accessible video camera on everyone’s waist won’t last long.
And since the discussion here is about this particular law, I have to point out that such a department would presumablyalready be running roughshod over everyone’s civil rights. So the question we should answer is: what’s the delta? That is, you cannot fairly lay at this law’s feet all the abuses from your hypothetical rogue sheriff, because he’s presumably already doing most of them. It seems odd to claim that the answer is to scuttle this law, instead of acepting the law and working to curb rogue officers everywhere.
However: You have acknowledged to us that stopping someone just for a casual conversation, including asking if he was here legally, creates the opportunity for “reasonable suspicion” to arise.
Cops won’t have to lie under this law, they’ll just have to say they were just being friendly. And they won’t have to admit anything about who they select to be friendly to.
Does that help clarify the problem for you?
What do you know about Sheriff Joe Arpaio?
He’s been at least as insistent that, since such cops are acting outside the law, the people they stop and arrest have “nothing to worry about”. He hasn’t even recognized the cognitive dissonance required there.
It ain’t due. But criticism where criticism is due, huh?
Cite? The guy doesn’t even observe the existence of such a thing as the “spirit of the law”.
And I referred you to the previous portions of the thread you hadn’t bothered to read yet before shitting in it.
Perhaps you missed the part where I declined to spoonfeed you.
This is an almost Hegelian argument, I think, inasmuch as it presumes that bad cops are bad cops no matter the law, and good cops are good cops no matter the law. I tend toward the “society made me do it” end of the spectrum myself. That is, this law pushes cops in the direction of being bad cops: it underpins their dealings with Hispanics with an edge of mistrust and suspicion that might not otherwise be there. Or, if it’s already there, it gives them a sense that society is backing their prejudice.
Although the law doesn’t say, “Try to arrest those dudes that look Mexican because they’re illegal immigrants,” I strongly suspect that a lot of cops will interpret it in that fashion. Very good cops won’t, of course, because they’ll know the law. And very bad cops are already doing that. But the vast middle of cops will be pushed in that direction by the law.
Thanks for making my point to Bricker and the other readers. How you get away with such nonsense in GD is beyond me.
If you really think a poster is threadshitting, report it, don’t engage in similar behavior.
Ratchet back the hostility, now.
[ /Modding ]
Done as requested.
Perhaps, if the sniping is over, we can now get back to the painful (but, in this forum, obviously necessary) work of distinguishing analysis from advocacy in Bricker’s lectures here? Not everyone here seems to be aware of the difference, or of the broader difference between erudition and wisdom. Orr even how much he’s strenuously omitting from and distractingly adding to his lectures.
I see none of that. Now true, Bricker has not come out and said “this law is eviiil and immoral and worthy of the Nazis”, but he very rare (if ever) weighs in on the morality of a law, just what the law says.
He has, however, suggested that fears about the law’s ramifications are overblown, and that goes well beyond a defense of its legality into a defense of its advisability. It’s helpful to distinguish between the two.
Arizona governor signs changes into immigration law - CNN.com Arizona Go. Brewer already signed a new law modifying the other almost new one. Previously the cops could stop a person if he had suspicion that he was an illegal. (guilty of looking Mexican). Now it has to as a result of stopping them for another violation.
That takes it back to where it was before. Now the law changes are about picking up several people for work and the provisions about companies hiring illegals.
To be fair to Bricker, the title of this thread is “Legality of the new Arizona Immigration Law.” He seems to be the only one staying on topic here.
You can’t honestly or usefully isolate the topic from its context. The law doesn’t exist in hermetic abstraction in which legality can be established purely and objectively. It’s just a tool to serve justice, nothing more. What the effects of this law in the real world may be is precisely why it was written and enacted, and what all the other fuss is about too.
By his trying to keep this in the arid, airless world of Socratic word-parsing, I say Bricker is the one here most strenuously avoiding the topic.
And, I should add, even a hermetic technical discussion is based on the definition of “reasonable”. That obviously cannot be surgically removed from real-world context anyway, any more than “justice” can be defined without reference to the real world. But give Bricker credit for trying to do so anyway, as his use of the remarkable term “objectively reasonable” illustrates.
The term “objectively reasonable” is a legal term and seems unremarkable to me in this context.
The topic is the legality of the law. Any real world impact is only relevant if it has some impact on how the courts will decide the issue.
A facial challenge to this law based on predictions of how police will act in the future will likely fail. There is just no law saying States can’t pass a facially race neutral law that might lead to discrimination. You have to show police discriminated intentionally, which you can’t do until the police take some action under this law.
I believe this law will lead to discrimination by the police, but that’s not to say that I think a lawyer arguing that point in court would succeed in challenging the law. If you think that argument would succeed in court you are free to make a legal argument explaining why. But when talking about something’s legality, you can’t make a policy argument with any legal context.