thatguyoverthere wrote:I voted for "unconstitutional" but I'm really more half-and-half. How's that for sitting on the fence!
Seriously, if a person is stopped ("temporarily detained" I think is the phrase?) then under
certain conditions, the LEO may need to do a "frisk" for his own safety. I don't have too much of a problem with that.
However, the LEO better have a REAL good, clearly defined reason to stop that person in the first place. That's where I get the heartburn.
My problem with it is that "I smell marijuana" is too easy to make up as a phony excuse to search. It's not quantifiable. It's not empirical. What if a cop claims that he smells marijuana, and uses that as the excuse to search your vehicle.......and finds nothing......because
there is nothing to find? It invites two things, neither of which is good: (1) it invites an examination of a clean cop's reliability as an expert and "friend of the court"; and (2) it invites a crooked cop to plant something in your car to account for his untruthful claim of smelling marijuana (or crack, or gunpowder, or whatever).
I agree that there are situations where an officer should have the ability to temporarily detain someone, even frisk them, if it is for their own safety. The problem is, where is the bright line that distinguishes the legitimate application from the illegitimate? There isn't one, and it is far too easy for a bad cop to get away with this stuff, particularly when a lot of the people whom they will abuse this way have neither the education, resources, or inclination to confront a bad cop on his home turf (his chain of command at the police station) through the process of filing complaints and/or pursuing litigation - the only two forms of redress that will both
correct a bad cop AND
provide redress to the innocent citizen whose rights have been violated.
I absolutely believe in "backing the blue". It is a hard and sometimes dangerous job which, in my personal opinion, is underpaid. But good policing is an absolute necessity underpinning a just and orderly society, and so there can be ZERO tolerance for abusing the rights of a citizen under the color of authority conferred by a badge. If that means that sometimes a guilty party gets away without charges for some relatively minor infraction, like possession of weed, that is better than the wholesale disregard for the constitutional rights of the population at large. So if a cop smells marijuana - or at least
thinks he smells marijuana - unless he sees the physical evidence laying there in plain sight, or actually sees the subject smoking a joint, he should just let it go. After all, how does he know that the smell isn't comin from the nearby bushes or houses where somebody IS smoking weed, having nothing at all to do with the subject in the vehicle he has stopped? And even if it is obvious that the smell is coming from inside the subject's car, unless he sees marijuana smoke drifting out the window at the time of the stop, how does he know that the smell isn't coming from someone else having smoked a joint in that car two days prior? The fact is, he doesn't. And finally, how much of a danger is someone who has a mild buzz on to an investigating officer? Heck,
I used to smoke that stuff 45 years ago, and
I was never a danger to any cop.....because like
most people, including most people who smoke weed, I am not nor have I ever been predisposed to violence against
anybody, let alone against police.
So I am uncomfortable with that kind of thing because it is ripe for abuse. Not saying that most cops abuse it. I'm just saying that it is too
easy to abuse if a cop were so inclined. So when a fellow citizen is given that much authority by virtue of the badge, the standards of acceptable behaviors need to be
tighter, not
looser. I say pay the police better, hire only those who have a decent education with good grades, subject them to very high standards of evidence gathering, provide them with counseling without stigma attached to help them handle the job stresses AND to remind them that the people with whom they interact are, for the most part, their fellow
citizens, train them to have a due reverence for what the rights and guarantees of citizenship means, and then come down like a ton of bricks on those officers who violate the standards.
It can be difficult to be a good cop, but it is not impossible, as demonstrated by the literally hundreds of thousands of good cops who go to work every day to make our world a better place. God love them for it. But this nation BADLY needs to return to a due reverence for our most basic rights, because the bad apples in the police barrel are a direct reflection of the society we live in, and the gov't under which we labor. I won't say we deserve better, because we get what we vote for. But I will say that we
should deserve better......because we should vote better.
