So. Part One introduced you to highway drug interdiction and what it typically looks like. On the face of it- if you’re a straight white male who’s lived in a straight white
male world your entire life-
Well, then, it’s pretty cut and dried. Yup, drugs are a scourge that should be eliminated by any means necessary to protect our society, so you can safely raise your kids and those kids can grow up to have more kids and so on and so forth. Sure, there’s lots of clever defense attorneys who’ll throw every technicality in the book at your case in order to let this evil scumbag go; but you’ve been trained by the best. You’ve seen a thing or two, and you know EXACTLY how to articulate this case to thread it around the traps those godless attorneys will throw at you. You sleep well at night knowing (and I mean this honestly) that you’re protecting society from these evils.
If you’re seething while reading this, just remember you haven’t been in this world. There are thousands and thousands of cops who chose LE as a career because they honestly wanted to protect their fellow man. There are plenty that saw it as an opportunity to further their grade school career as a bully, yes; but that’s not what I saw amongst the officers I worked with. Most of us got into it with the noblest of intentions; and while I may have been lucky in the agencies I worked for, the sort of scandals you see at agencies like Minneapolis, Portland, NYPD, LA- even Atlanta PD- were unknown in the ones I worked. I don’t know how I lucked out in that.
But the longer you’re in- especially if your agency doesn’t have a strong ethical and moral center- the idea that you’re “losing the war” grows ever larger and more influential. Every case that you busted your ass on, that you crossed every T and dotted every I on, that you lose on a “technicality” or through the foibles of the judge, is another strike in favor of juggling the odds in your favor. As a very minor example, I once had a municipal court judge dismiss my Obedience to a Traffic Control Device (running a red light) ticket because “it’s Valentine’s Day, and everyone should go free on Valentine’s Day.”
Now, that’s very minor, yes; but it pissed the ever-living fuck out of me. Where’s the case law on Valentine’s Day being an automatic get out of jail free card for traffic misdemeanors? Judges are Gods in their courtrooms; what can you do? What about that evidence you found on a search warrant that’s thrown out because you didn’t describe the instruments, articles, or things which have been used in the commission of a crime exactly right in your affidavit and your evidence is determined to be outside the scope of the search? Never mind that the whole system, through countless cases and appeals, is pretty firmly tilted in your favor. Pretty soon, you get tired of following every rule to the letter; every policy to it’s exact wording; and you… cut corners.
And these “acts of omission” pretty soon become “acts of commission”, and before you know it, you’re deep into unethical behavior that you’re convinced is the only way to do your job.
And, almost every time, you get away with it. And you get bolder, and lazier, confident that the prosecutor and judges and city or county officials will give you, the cop, the benefit of the doubt; and let you get away with it in the name of “public safety”.
And the body of “case law” gets deeper and deeper in your favor; and you get even more fat and lazy and complacent.
DRRRAGGING this conversation back to the point; what does that have to do with the interdiction stop of the DSU Lacross team bus recently?
Well, the stop itself was a TEXTBOOK presentation of how to conduct a highway drug interdiction stop. Each and every one of the deputies involved comported themselves in a professional and polite manner. It was all recorded, even if the Sheriff did spout off his mouth before he had the facts and, politely speaking, stepped on his dick. The investigation revealed no drugs and all parties were free to go on their way in a reasonable amount of time.
So, what’s all the hubbub, Bub? Why are all these bleeding-heart LIBRULS making such a stink?
Because they came from a very different background than these deputies; and they’ve seen this sort of “this is for your own good”, “I’m on your side, honest; if you ain’t done nothing wrong you’ve got nothing to worry about” invasions of privacy based off of eggshell-thin probable cause before. Far, far too many times.
So, armed with the first essay on interdiction as our baseline, let’s look at this stop in particular. The video I watched came from https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2022/05/11/body-camera-footage-contradicts-sheriffs-account-georgia-bus-stop/9729651002/
The video starts as the bus is stopped. Busses on the interstate are are particularly prized target amongst interdiction officers, because of the people who travel on them. Long-haul busses like those annoying Megabusses or, even better, busses that run from Mexico to various parts of the US, are juicy targets. They got a lot of “those” people on them- you know, poor, shiftless vagrants who just flit between cities; with no doubt nefarious ambitions once they alight in a new location. If you were an honest citizen; wouldn’t you be able to fly or drive your own car from place to place? Poor folks are always committing crimes; and drug mules can use this transportation vector efficiently. A Mexican bus? Anything from south of the border is suspect; and even if they’re not transporting drugs for some hazy Mexican cartel, they’re bringing people to take our (white male) jobs.
Am I saying every cop has this thought foremost in their mind? No, of course not.
But… The job DOES tend to promote these sorts of ideas into the back of your head; where they slowly work on you.
So you see this unmarked charter bus pass you and you get behind it, looking for any reason to pull it over. Lo and behold, the driver travels in the far left lane; a technical violation that you’ve probably never written on a normal basis (unless you’re a truck trooper), but gives you the opening you need to pull it over. A pretextual stop; remember those? Light ‘er up.
You’ve already got a posse of backup units with you; including that important K9 unit. That’s your ace in the hole. So, while you talk to the driver, the K9 sniffs the luggage compartment. Take your time; bring the driver back to your car and make small talk with him to give the K9 time to provide your PC to go further. Normally, you’d need a warrant to make such a detailed search of a vehicle; but being a vehicle, and “inherently mobile”, gives you some warrantless exceptions. Be sure to use all the good-sounding boilerplate phrases, like “they did a study a long time ago that showed how dangerous this driving behavior is” and refer to the “number of crashes and fatalities on this highway”. Hey, I’m the good guy here; just keeping the highways safe.
My favorite bit of verbiage along these lines had a modicum of truth- “Ga 316 is THE MOST dangerous highway in the state of Georgia based on fatalities”- was, actually, true. When it opened, because of it’s shitty, cost-saving design that had uncontrolled intersections every couple of miles, we racked up a truly obscene number of fatality accidents; the images from which will be imprinted on my brain forever. But save that for the guy that’s doing 110mph in heavy traffic.
Well, dang, it’s not a busload of mexicans running dope for a cartel. BUT, it IS a bunch of black college students; and you know how they love their weed. I listened to Busta Rhymes once, you know. Maybe you’ll get something after all. And hey! The K9 hit on the luggage area, so you’re good to go. Maybe you’ll dig up something. Be sure when you talk to the students on the bus that they know you’re looking for SERIOUS things… why, these busses are sometimes used to TRAFFICK CHILDREN as sex slaves.
Yes, that was said on this video.
Now, where have I heard that logic before?
They could have shortened their time on the side of the road by having the dog sniff the luggage after it was out of the bus; but I saw no evidence of that. We’re on a fishing expedition here, one with a limited timeframe of reasonability, so let’s fish quickly.
Whoa, what have we here? A plain package wrapped in brown paper? That got some pulses elevated. Alas, it turned out to be a still shrink-wrapped book safe that was a gift from an aunt to one of the students.
(A BOOK SAFE?!? Why, those are used to hide CONTRABAND! Believe me, I got to know every variation of this theme- fake 2-liter cola bottles, cans of baked beans, you name it. This deputy didn’t pursue it much further, to his credit, when he saw it was still shrinkwrapped and unused; but you KNOW he was thinking “she’s gonna store her weed in here when she gets back”)
The one thing that I saw that made me think about the bigger picture in this little slice of interdiction reality was the expressions of the faces of the students on the bus. All black females, all with a resigned “this is bullshit, but what can I do about it” look on their faces. They’ve seen this from LE their entire lives; on every traffic stop or encounter with the police- or well-off white society- their entire lives. It’s an inescapable reality for them that those of us who have never lived it don’t understand. The idea that the cops are always there, always looking for some reason to snag you and make you pay for your “crimes”.
That they don’t seem to snag too many middle or upper class white folks at the same time is just another knife in the back. Does make you wonder how many busses full of retired white folks headed to a Senior’s Casino Vacation get stopped and searched, though… and of those that are, how many were done just to get some “clean stops” on their record in case some smartass defense attorney asks.
“Whoa there, skippy”, you heatedly interject. “Are you saying these deputies are racist?”
Now, how can I possibly know that? I’ve never met them, that I know of. I have no idea.
But I spent 20 years in LE in Georgia, and I’m pretty sure the undercurrents there are the same as they were for me. No one comes out and SAYS the n-word; but euphemisms are OK. If someone said they just broke up a house party full of “democrats”, they meant black people. “Wetback” was still an acceptable slur, but “chink” was a bridge too far. Poor whites busted for meth related crimes were “dirtlegs”. A photo recognition book of various homeless people frequently encountered was named the “Skinnies Final Solution Book”. Being poor was far more likely to make you a target than skin color; but being poor AND a minority generally led to harsher treatment.
By “harsher treatment” I don’t mean having someone kneel on your neck until you’re dead; although that has obviously happened, and happens more often these days. “Harsher” is the difference between going to jail or being given a warning; when going to jail will utterly crash your world to the ground. Most of the officers I worked with would not label themselves as racist, and would loudly proclaim that they treated everyone equally… because they didn’t even see how their disparate treatment was a problem. Most of them likely didn’t recognize it in themselves.
But it’s a pervasive, low-level rot; that slowly seeps into the consciousness and very fabric of an agency, and gradually changes you over a long period of time. And the “us vs. them” mentality that is hammered into you day after day, seemingly reinforced by your daily experiences, doesn’t help. If you looked back on those reinforcing experiences and critically dissected them, from start to finish, you’ll see that it’s your own conviction that the public is out to get you and therefore your enemy that made that interaction turn out the way it did. Is some of the public out to get you? Of course. There are very real dangers. There are countless stories of officers killed because they let their guard down for a mere second.
But there’s also millions of interactions on a daily basis that don’t result in bloodshed… and others that wouldn’t, had the police not treated everyone as a threat.
And in this corner of LE- the one tasked with eradicating drugs and drug use- has done more to reinforce all of the things I’ve mentioned and coalesce them into one messy package than almost anything else. Even the popular name for it- the war on drugs- implies that this is combat on a daily basis and only warriors can fight it.
So, yes, this was a textbook interdiction stop on a bus. Calm, courteous, and professional.
It’s also an assault on individual freedoms for a vague, unending war that could be better fought by addressing root issues than with guns and “investigative detentions” or jump-outs. A war that was declared for very shaky reasons and has resulted in punishing disparate numbers of minorities, forcing them into becoming a permanent underclass. A war that has even further tarnished police officers who fought it and antagonized the divide on either side of the “thin blue line between order and chaos”. A war, and the ensuing mentality, that has “us vs. them”’d us to the point that reforming law enforcement is going to take decades and drastic measures.
The interdiction stop itself was perfect on the face of it… but rotten to the core, nonetheless.