The Nation : Diluting Individual Rights Is No Way to Fight Crime

STANFORD — As part of his seemingly tireless efforts to outdo Republicans on law-and-order issues, President Bill Clinton recently asked Atty. Gen. Janet Reno to find ways to circumvent a federal judge’s injunction forbidding random police searches of apartments in a federal housing development in Chicago. Clinton could have assured tenants that the federal government would do all it could do to provide whatever level of policing was needed to stop the violence at the complex. Instead, the President pandered to police and public impatience with rising crime: He urged the department responsible for prosecuting officers who violate people’s constitutional rights to assist the police in evading the Constitution.

The Taylor Homes in Chicago was the scene of so many gang shootings that some tenants, in desperation, asked police to sweep the complex and, without warrants, search apartments for firearms. The random searches, however, produced more resentment than illegal firearms. Judge Wayne Anderson blocked any more searches on the ground they violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

The government then did what it should have done in the first place: It increased the number of police in the community, and the shootings stopped.

The attorney representing the tenants conceded that the searches were the “wrong issue.” Providing adequate security was--and is--the real answer.

Ironically, the police could have been more effective in Chicago if they had acted legally. The courts have ruled that cops may frisk a person suspected of carrying a weapon. Accordingly, gang members who lived in the Chicago housing complex could have been frisked and arrested if they were found to illegally possess a weapon. Furthermore, if the Chicago police had been working closely with the community, the information necessary to secure search warrants may have been readily available.

What is especially troubling about the Administration’s apparent desire to get around Fourth Amendment protections is that it plays into our country’s history of mistreating non-whites. It was only in 1961, in Mapp vs. Ohio, that the U.S. Supreme Court put police on final notice that the courts would no longer turn a blind eye toward random searches.

Dollree Mapp was a black woman. The Cleveland police falsely claimed they had a search warrant when they pushed into her home over the objections of her lawyer. The officers searched her house, eventually finding some obscene photos. She was arrested. The Supreme Court, in Mapp, found this conduct shocking, observing that such misconduct had continued despite previous court rulings denouncing brutal police methods.

The Chicago experience, and the history it reawakens, once again underlines how much harder it is to make democracy work through good government and community commitments than to engage in anti-crime rhetoric. The omnibus crime bill now working its way through Congress is a good example of how rhetorical fever can overcome sound judgment and experience--at the expense of democracy.

The bill establishes federal death penalties for many crimes, among them the non-violent crime of drug trafficking. The federal courts are already inundated with non-violent drug cases. Burdening them with trying capital-punishment cases, which take years to adjudicate, will crash the system. If for no other reason than the courts would be paralyzed, the bill should be rejected.

But the legislation contains other equally bad provisions. Putting 100,000 more cops on the street sounds good--but when they are assigned across the country, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, they will not be visible enough to have much impact. Then, too, no one in Washington seems to want to discuss who will pay for these officers once the one-to-three-year federal funding expires.

The crime bill also continues the incremental federalizing of crimes that used to be a local responsibility--such as car-jacking, low-level drug crimes, and gang activities and assault--just because the victim is a federal employee. Despite such federal law-enforcement failures as the Drug Enforcement Agency’s inability to control drug abuse, Congress keeps assuring the public that they will be safer because federal officers can now make arrests in local crimes. All these things are rapidly pushing us toward a national police force--an idea once regarded as a threat to our freedom.

The Clinton Administration is fond of saying that there is a need for “smarter” work by agencies of criminal justice, but it seems to be promoting “dumber” expanded bureaucracies. There is no need for any dilution of individual rights that took centuries to achieve. The murderers striking the most terror in the hearts of people during this century have not been serial killers like Ted Bundy. They have been governments that have killed millions of their citizens in the name of social order. The authors of the Bill of Rights knew the danger and drafted a document for our protection. We should not let panic about crime erode it.*