theroot | Around the world, experts
(as expected) are clawing into every legal nook and cranny to ask one of
the most pressing questions of 2015: Exactly how many rights do you
have should you see the popo’s red and blue lights flashing in the
rearview?
It’s not crystal clear. While we’d like to think we have enough
constitutional armor to take on a trigger-snapping squad of Boss Hog’s
finest, the unfortunate reality is that we don’t. Thanks
to a permanently ideological Supreme Court dominated by conservative
stalwarts, the cops have even more rights than you do.
And even in the post-Bland world, you
should anticipate traffic stops getting worse, since the Supreme Court
is usually unmoved by current events.
To most living through the social-media-magnified #BlackLivesMatter
microscope, any notion of enhanced police power seems unreasonable and
unfathomable. Which is why black folks, understandably, are pushing
back. Yet even with increased smartphone surveillance and hourly
scrutiny of police, law enforcement seems strangely emboldened ... and
even dismissive.
Like the rest of us, Texas state Trooper Brian Encinia hadn’t been
living in a bubble when he stopped Bland. Unless all he did was watch
the Cartoon Network and read comic books on his downtime, Encinia had to
have known that every random, modern traffic stop has the potential to
carry heavy consequences.
More than likely he knew, thereby rendering hours of mandatory
de-escalation training meaningless. But his failure to professionally
deal with Bland also reflects something police culture gets that we
haven’t fully grasped: that they’re already given quite a wide range of
latitude to stop, search, seize and arrest.
Quite a few folks, including the Center for American Progress, have cited the Rodriguez v. United States (pdf)
decision in April as good-enough reason that Bland should never have
seen the inside of a jail. As Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
put it, “The tolerable duration of police inquiries in the traffic-stop
context is determined by the seizure’s ‘mission’—to address the traffic
violation that warranted the stop, and attend to related safety
concerns.”
In other words, since Bland didn’t represent any threat—she only
failed to use a signal to change lanes and was understandably irritated
at being stopped—there was no “mission” justifying any arrest in the
first place.
But the problem here is that either Encinia didn’t get the memo on Rodriguez or he (as well as others) is getting mixed messages from a high court known for its scrabbled aloofness. Although Rodriguez
may have resolved traffic-stop length of time, it didn’t address the
much more consequential traffic-stop reasoning the same way a less-hyped
Heien v. North Carolina (pdf) ruling did when it dropped last December.
Heien is like the legal Godzilla of bad cop excuses: An
officer’s “mistake of law,” opined conservative Chief Justice John
Roberts, can be constitutional so long as it’s all “reasonable.” In
essence, it gives aggressive police officers the kind of legal
elbow room they need for misconduct; or, as criminal-justice expert
Lauren Kirchner explains,
“[I]t essentially gives cops even more latitude than they already had,
to stop whomever they want, for whatever pretext they claim.”
Heien also pretty much played backup to another little-known 1997 ruling called Maryland v. Wilson,
in which the court agreed that officers can order passengers out of
cars during any traffic stop, crime or no crime. Then-Chief Justice
William H. Rehnquist wrote at the time that “the same weighty interest
in officer safety is present regardless of whether the occupant of the
stopped car is a driver or passenger.”
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