One of the hallmarks of police states everywhere is the internal checkpoint. Think of all the movies you’ve seen where some Nazi or Soviet bureaucrat—backed up by uniformed thugs—is blocking a road or a train platform and demanding that people “show me your papers!”
For a long time, we here in the United States could look down on other countries for their sad practice of making citizens justify their every movement to the government. We didn’t put up with that here.
But times have been changing.
I guess it probably started with airport metal detectors. After a spate of aircraft hijackings, airports started passing all passengers through metal detectors, creating a checkpoint of sorts, although it wasn’t necessary to show your papers.
(Yes folks, in ancient times—the 1950’s and early 1960’s, I think—you could walk into the airport and board a plane just by showing the nice stewardess your ticket.)
Keep in mind, however, that there has always been more to a security station than a metal detector. They can make you empty your pockets, and they can search through your belongings. They may not literally ask for your papers, but they can still mess with your stuffl
Metal detectors soon spread to courtrooms and then to schools. In each case, there was some justification on the basis of safety—nobody wants a shooting in either of those places. Of course, nobody wants a shooting anywhere else either, if we can help it, but that was never before a reason to allow warrantless searches.
Later—I think in response to the mid-air explosion of TWA flight 800—the rules changed, and airports started requiring travelers to show ID, turning the airport security stations into true checkpoints. (Someone must have thought that international terrorists would be stumped at the task of creating fake ID.) This intrusion remained, even after it was shown that the explosion of flight 800 was not a terrorist act.
Somewhere along the way, we started having drunk driving roadblocks, where police would stop everybody traveling down a road and try to figure out if they’re driving under the influence. The justification, as usual, was public safety. Yet whenever police run one of these operations, the overwhelming majority of arrests are for crimes other than DUI, meaning that the safety argument is little more than a thin excuse for operating a checkpoint.
So, we’ve been sneaking up on internal checkpoints for a few decades now, but that’s not good enough for some people. In our nation’s capital, police chief Cathy L. Lanier wants to have the police cordoning off whole blocks and interrogating everyone who wants to enter or leave:
At least six officers will man cordons around those zones and demand identification from people coming in and out of them. Anyone who doesn’t live there, work there or have “legitimate reason” to be there will be sent away or face arrest…
That’s the real thing, internal checkpoints, like every totalitarian state in the world. Supposedly, other U.S. cities have done this already.
The proposal has the provisional support of D.C. Councilman Harry “Tommy” Thomas, D-Ward 5, whose ward has become a war zone.
“They’re really going to crack down on what we believe to be a systemic problem with open-air drug markets,” Thomas told The Examiner.
Thomas said, though, that he worried about D.C. “moving towards a police state.”
No, when people need police permission to enter and leave the places where they live, that is a police state.
(Hat tip: Radley)
There are all sorts of internal police checkpoints, run all over Chicago, for that matter. They happen for a variety of reasons…to stop drunk driving, to do safety awareness, to ask about a recent crime. I saw a guy in court the other day who was pulled over DUI. He had driving through a police checkpoint near a post office. There had been a fatal hit and run accident nearby, the police hadn’t been able to find any witnesses, so they decided that people, both employees of the Post Office and others who just use it, would be coming and going around the same time each day as the accident occurred. So they just set up a check point and stopped everyone coming through to ask about whether they saw anything regarding the accident. This is legal. So are sobriety checkpoints. There’s actually interesting case law on this regarding what exactly the police can do when they set these up. What’s going in D.C. sounds ridiculous to me and I doubt it will withstand serious judicial scrutiny.
In The Crime Fighter, Jack Maple’s account of how he helped Bill Bratton clean up New York, he talks about putting DUI checkpoints in high-crime areas or in the middle of a drug market because it gives police a chance to peek in lots of cars. And if someone turns on a side street to avoid the checkpoint, a couple of patrol cars are standing by to stop and interrogate them. It’s all an elaborate excuse for a lot of pretext stops.
What struck me about the D.C. checkpoint is that it’s a blatant checkpoint. The drunk driving checkpoint, the safety checkpoint, and even the blanket stop to search for witnesses all have some (thin) justification. What they’re proposing in D.C. has no such rationale: It’s a full-on police-state checkpoint.