Free The Rights of the People by David K. Shipler Page A

vehicle could not have contained evidence relating to the cause of his arrest, the suspended license. 43
    The usual characters who claim Fourth Amendment violations are not sympathetic types, because their crimes seem clear: They’ve been caught red-handed with drugs or guns or stolen goods and are seeking to suppress the incriminating evidence. They generate little popular support, unlike Gail Atwater.
    She was just a “soccer mom” trying to find a lost toy. Fine, upstanding citizens could identify with her, since she lived within their circle of decency. Yes, she showed a lapse of judgment about safety, but she was no hardened drug dealer armed with deadly weapons. Had her arrest led to a vehicle search that uncovered guns and narcotics, she would have earned condemnation rather than the compassion she won as the mildly careless mother, handcuffed and dragged away in front of her small children.
    But the constitutional question would have been the same. When the Bill of Rights is violated, it’s usually hard to mobilize public concern, because the most obvious victims are the least admirable—accused criminals whose cases become the means through which courts regulate police behavior by applying the Constitution. And the resulting constitutional interpretations apply to everyone. The system, then, binds together the miscreants and the righteous: The most virtuous among us depend on the most villainous to carry the torch of liberty, for when the courts allow a criminal defendant’s rights to be violated, the same rights are diminished for the rest of us. As the bootlegger Carroll, the pistol-packing Terry, the gun-toting Wardlow, the drug-pushing Ross, and the pothead Acevedo lost some of their Fourth Amendment protections, so did we all.
    Most citizens who are searched without giving voluntary consent don’t go to court for the simple reason that they are entirely innocent. No evidence is found, and so—assuming the police are honest—no charges are brought against them. Yet they have been violated fundamentally. Unless they sue the police for damages, which is extremely rare and more rarely successful, their experiences add up to an invisible record across the United States of countless unconstitutional searches.
    Each night, the Power Shift leaves dozens of such victims in its wake. Rushing through blocks and courtyards, the officers consider the entire shift a success if a single gun is found, even when numerous innocents are stopped and frisked, their cars searched, their dignity assaulted, their zones of privacy invaded for naught. If a ballplayer batted with such a low average—one for thirty in this typical shift—he wouldn’t be a ballplayer for long. But the officers don’t keep track of the fruitless searches, and neither does anyone else. Instead, they reason that “it discourages them from carrying a gun,” Neill explained. “If you keep ’em pressured, they won’t bring the guns outside,” and a gun left home means a few more minutes to cool off before using it. The judicial process, it seems, is only incidental to crime prevention.
    On this June night, as Sergeant Neill got ready to take his men into the streets, he sat typing in a bare cubicle at the First District station house.To guard his privacy, he used his personal laptop instead of a department computer: He didn’t want the police department snooping into his files, he explained, or observing when he logged on and off. He wanted to compose his response to a complaint, a Form 119, without being monitored.
    Neill was peppered with complaints. He seemed miffed at this one but tried not to let it show much. It was from a driver whom he had pulled over for having tinted windows and a device that made the sound of a police “sirene,” as Neill spelled it (pronouncing it “si
reen
”). Neill had to justify frisking the driver, which he did by reporting that the man had seemed nervous enough to make Neill think there might be a gun.