Earlier this week we saw a perfect example of why real world experience and a deeper understanding of how the law works on the ground is vitally important in the Supreme Court. It came up during a case that involves the 4th Amendment, concerning illegal searches and seizures. Officials in Utah are arguing that anyone with an outstanding warrant should be subject to a search for potential unrelated offenses. The simpler version is, if you haven’t paid a speeding ticket on time, they want the ability to search your person and property for whatever else they might find.
Now, if you’re middle class or white, people with outstanding warrants probably sound like a seedy element to you. However, in many cases they are poorer people and frequently minorities who have been the targets of predatory policing. For those unfamiliar with the practice, predatory policing created the situation that erupted in Ferguson, MO in 2014. The police target a segment of the population and inundate those people with traffic tickets and citations for minor offenses. It’s the exact opposite of the community policing model we use here in Somerville, which is designed to include distinct racial, ethnic and economically disadvantaged populations as valued members of the larger community rather than isolate them.
It’s relatively easy to slam people with moving violations. Imagine if you got a ticket every time you inched above the speed limit, or failed to signal a right-hand turn or lane change, or didn’t come to a complete stop at a stop sign. We don’t operate that way here, but for many people in many places, local police are looking to pounce the moment they are less than perfect on the road. And that’s if the police feel like adhering to any sort of rules. Talk to black Americans and you’ll hear plenty of stories about how sometimes you get pulled over and/or ticketed when you didn’t do a single thing wrong.
So the tickets start to pile up and eventually poorer people have a hard time paying them. When that happens, the courts issue what amount to automatic warrants for the people in arrears. So a predatory police force can create a situation where a community is burdened with warrants based on unpaid moving violations, and now a case is before the Supreme Court asking for the ability to conduct searches at will on those predated populations.
This is one of the key points that the #BlackLivesMatter movement is trying to make, that predatory policing is creating different rules for different people. We need judges who know enough about what takes place out in the world to recognize when they are being presented with perversions of the law. Sadly we have too many who either don’t recognize it or don’t care. That is what the impending Supreme Court nomination is going to be about and it will be a defining issue in the 2016 Presidential election.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/supreme_court_dispatches/2016/02/in_the_oral_arguments_for_utah_v_strieff_the_supreme_court_s_liberals_spoke.html?wpsrc=sh_all_mob_em_ru