A Washington Post article describing a new initiative by Washington D.C. police to do a knock-and-search procedure for illegal guns and/or drugs has some conservatives all riled up.
D.C. police are so eager to get guns out of the city that they're offering amnesty to people who allow officers to come into their homes and get the weapons.
Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier announced yesterday the Safe Homes Initiative, aimed at parents and guardians who know or suspect that their children or other relatives have guns. Under the deal, police target areas hit by violence and seek adults who let them search their homes for guns, with no risk of arrest. The offer also applies to drugs that turn up during the searches, police said.
The program is scheduled to start March 24 in the Washington Highlands area of Southeast Washington. Officers will go door-to-door seeking permission to search homes for weapons. Police later plan to visit other areas, including sections of Columbia Heights in Northwest and Eckington in Northeast.
As with any program that involves police, the community, and the police coming into your home looking for illegal guns, there's bound to be some serious concern.
Ronald Hampton, executive director of the National Black Police Association, questioned the Washington effort. As a lifelong D.C. resident and a former police officer, he said, he would not consent to his house being searched.
"They haven't earned that level of access or respect from the community," Hampton said. "I just can't believe they're trying to do that. I've never heard of anything like that in my life."
Arthur B. Spitzer, legal director of the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the program is "a very bad idea." He said officers might act so aggressively that residents feel coerced into letting them in.
"It sends the message to the public that the police ought to be able to search your house anytime for any reason," Spitzer said. "People will be intimidated. That cheapens civil liberties and privacy for everyone."
But don't let this stop conservatives, who like the good patriots they are - frequently rallying behind tough crime legislation, national security, border patrol, and things like war in Iraq, potentially Iran, etc, - to let this pass without running around screaming about the 4th amendment like a chicken with it's head cut off.
Enter
RedStateGuys, this is down right frieghtening. I cannot even begin where to start with this story which comes from our nation's capitol.
Police will be doing door to door "consent" searches for guns. That means they knock on your door and ask if they may search your house for fire arms banned under the current law being contested in the Supreme Court.
Residents will be asked to sign "consent" forms while being promised "amnesty." If weapons are found, they will be tested to see if they were used in any crimes. If the results come back in the affirmation, the the police may take futher steps to investigate the crime.
Actually, what they're searching for is:
"...announced yesterday the Safe Homes Initiative, aimed at parents and guardians who know or suspect that their children or other relatives have guns. Under the deal, police target areas hit by violence and seek adults who let them search their homes for guns, with no risk of arrest. The offer also applies to drugs that turn up during the searches, police said."
Continuing on,
Citizens should not be subjected to "prevalence" in which you are guilty until proven innocent. If there is a legitimate reason for law enforcement officers to search a house, then the Constitution makes a very specific case for that. In fact the legal precedent is very clear.
Obviously, someone isn't reading the article. Either that, or they're reading into it a little too much. There's not being any presumption of guilt at this point. Again, from the article:
The program is scheduled to start March 24 in the Washington Highlands area of Southeast Washington. Officers will go door-to-door seeking permission to search homes for weapons. Police later plan to visit other areas, including sections of Columbia Heights in Northwest and Eckington in Northeast.
"If we come across illegal contraband, we will confiscate it," Lanier said.
Sounds to me, so far anyways, that if a cop shows up on my door and asks to look for guns, they're not showing up with a specific warrant; they're asking permission. And I can refuse to grant that permission at this point still.
But don't let that get in the way of skewed wingnut logic:
Citizens are to be protected from illegal search and seizure. That means that without probable cause their should be no reason to access a home or business. This policy being followed by the Washington, D.C. police is in direct contradiction to those protections and flies in the face of our basic rights.
Um, what's illegal about the police knocking on your door, telling you why they're there, and asking permission to come into your house to find illegal guns? If you give them permission, it's not illegal. If you don't, they don't come in. And if they do, well then that's a different bag of potatoes altogether.
Of course, no good 4th Amendment argument ends without a harbinger of doom:
Sadly, once we head down this path then we subject our selves to some very serious issues which undermind the very fabric of our liberties. I hope that you would join me in contacting your law makers and voicing outrage with this policy before it spreads.
This type of policy is a type of cancer which will kill the very basic and fundamental liberties which our nation is founded upon. If it is not dealt with swiftly, then many if not all others will fall closely behind them.
Oh know! The sky is falling! It's the end of the world!!!
Except that:
D.C. police are so eager to get guns out of the city that they're offering amnesty to people who allow officers to come into their homes and get the weapons.
What we have here is a classic example of the Republican pro-warrantless wiretapping and domestic eavesdropping argument, "If you haven't done anything wrong, and you have nothing to hide, then why fear expanded intelligence gathering aimed at the domestic populace?"
Right? Wasn't that the argument when the NYTimes broke the story of the warrantless wiretapping program? I seem to remember countless posts, comments, and arguments about the benefits of the intelligence gathering, even if it was sucking up
ALL of your emails, phone calls, banking transactions, credit card purchases, and then by extension, perhaps all the emails, phone calls, banking transactions, credit card purchases of everyone you come in contact with. And so on and so on.
Besides, the program is also working in conjunction with people who want to report potential guns that children and relatives have in high crime areas and we don't want children having guns, right? And even if having a gun is a right in order to defend yourself and whether or not the argument that "if you take away all the guns, only outlaws will have guns argument" is brought up, children aren't the best people to have guns and yet, enough crime is committed by children with guns due to retaliation, fear, intimidation and ease of access to justify removal of the guns from their access if they're not already reasonably secured.
And lastly, let's suppose Joe McConservative, a proud gun-toting NRA member with licenses for all his guns gets a knock on his door. It's the police and they'd like to search his home for guns. He asks for a warrant and the police explain they're not on a call, but that they're fulfilling a new initiative to remove guns, potentially illegal guns as well, from homes where they are suspected of being, most likely due to tips from concerned neighbors.
What does Joe McConservative do? I think these are his options:
1. Say no. (There's no warrant and it's voluntary permission based.)
2. Say yes. (Because you have nothing illegal and therefore, nothing to hide)
3. Go on a tirade with the police about illegal search and seizure, how it's all the liberal's fault and probably end up barricading yourself in your home with all your guns, though perhaps legally owned and licensed, and create a situation you might not survive.
If I recall, shortly after 9/11, the Bush Administration briefly enacted a program called
Operation Tips:
The program's website implied that US workers who had access to private citizens' homes, such as cable installers and telephone repair workers, would be reporting on what was in people's homes if it were deemed "suspicious."
Operation TIPS was accused of doing an "end run" around the United States Constitution, and the original wording of the website was subsequently changed. President Bush's former Attorney General, John Ashcroft denied that private residences would be surveiled by private citizens operating as government spies.
Mr. Ashcroft nonetheless defended the program, equivocating on whether the reports by citizens on fellow citizens would be maintained in government databases. While saying that the information would not be in a central database as part of Operation TIPS, he maintained that the information would still be kept in databases by various law enforcement agencies.
The databases were an explicit concern of various civil liberties groups (on both the left and the right) who felt that such databases could include false information about citizens with no way for those citizens to know that such information was compiled about them, nor any way for them to correct the information, nor any way for them to confront their accusers.
Today, that program is called...well, we don't really know what it's called because it's "super-dooper double-fudge secret" and if we even talk about it, the terrorists win or something but...we know it exists. Some call it the TSP, others call it warrantless wiretapping, some call it domestic eavesdropping. Whatever.
But think about that guy living down in D.C. He's
John Doe and he frequently sees suspicious looking dark-skinned men, some who wear long dresses, congregating outside one particular house late at night. They could be terrorists!
Or they could be freedom and America loving Muslims hanging out.
Aren't we better safe than sorry?
If it turns out everything is kosher, than surely they won't mind putting the police and their local community at ease that they're responsible, law-abiding citizens with nothing to hide. After all, it's patriotic to trust the government to protect us and make sure those entrusted with keeping us safe have all the tools necessary at their disposal to maintain that safety.
And if they're not the moral, patriotic, America-loving, responsible, law-abiding citizens we hope that they will be, and that they
should be, well then perhaps they need some tough scrutiny to root out the evil-doings. After all, if they're not moral, responsible, law-abiding legal citizens, they face a threat, ultimately, to this country, whether it be through violence, immoral behavior, un-patriotism, irresponsible, non-law-abiding behavior that ultimately needs to be exposed and removed as it's a cancer on our society and if left untreated, will likely fester and spread across the land.
Really, with all this outrage over a simple little
voluntary gun seizure program, what's all the hub-bub, bub?
