In yet another expansion of police powers since 9/11, the Supreme Court ruled this week that evidence obtained through illegal “no knock” police searches is still admissible in court. So cops don’t have to worry about following the letter of the law too closely in home raids, because even their illegal actions can still be used to land convictions.
The ruling is a big green light for cops to push the limits of their power even further, conducting ever more aggressive raids. And that’s something that, in this Green Scare crackdown on civil liberties in the name of fighting “eco-terrorism,” all activists should be worried about.
At first blush, this might all seem kind of trivial. I mean, why should we give criminals the courtesy of knocking on their doors, and giving them time to flush evidence down the toilet?
Because we don’t know they’re criminals, for one thing. A search warrant isn’t a guilty verdict. It just means that the cops have convinced the court they have reason to believe they would find evidence of a crime if they searched a location. It doesn’t mean that the evidence will be there, and it doesn’t mean that person is guilty of a crime. That’s for the courts to decide, not the cops.
Before this ruling, the “knock and announce” rule meant SWAT teams couldn’t just kick down a door, rifles in hand, and ransack a house. They had knock on the door, say “POLICE! WE HAVE A WARRANT!” (or other action-packed dialogue — you get the idea), and wait a reasonable amount of time for a response. Otherwise any evidence would get thrown out of court.
In 1995, the court made this part of what defines a “reasonable search” under the Fourth Amendment. Today’s 5 to 4 decision in Hudson v. Michigan flies in the face of that.
It’s a huge blow to checks and balances on police power. At the end of the day, cops want to look successful, they want their door-kicking to lead to a conviction. That’s why the “exclusionary rule,” as the courts call it, is pretty effective. It means that if cops don’t respect your rights, like the right to remain silent, any evidence they obtain will be excluded from court. This ruling, then, could be used to chip away at other Fourth Amendment protections.
Don’t get me wrong, I think there are plenty of bigger rights abuses by law enforcement out there than not knocking on a door. At the end of the day, though, ALL of our rights are crucial and should be defended, and we can’t let the government whittle away at them piece by piece.
Don’t think that will happen? Think again.
As Charles Lane wrote in The Washington Post:
Scalia argued that the law enforcement landscape has changed dramatically since 1961, when the Supreme Court first imposed an exclusionary rule on the states to protect against warrantless searches. Today’s police are more professional than those of 45 years ago, he observed, and there is “increasing evidence that police forces across the United States take the constitutional rights of citizens seriously.”
That’s so absolutely terrifying that I think it’s worth repeating: Supreme Court justices feel that basic Constitutional protections aren’t necessary because there is “increasing evidence that police forces across the United States take the constitutional rights of citizens seriously.”
In other words: trust us, you don’t need your rights, we’re the government, and only criminals have something to hide.
It’s times like this that I think we should be calling this “The Scare,” instead of the Green Scare, because every reasonable person in the United States should be very afraid of this reckless rollback of basic civil liberties and constitutional rights.