Of the many significant rights that our Constitution protects, there is probably none so basic as the freedom to walk down the street without having to explain yourself to an officer of the government and obtain his approval before proceeding on. Take a walk. It’s so basic. Yet the District of Columbia, in its misguided desire to stem “the violence that plagued the Trinidad neighborhood,” decided to take it away.
After an injunction was refused by the district court, the D.C, Circuit, in an opinion in Mills v. District of Columbia by Chief Judge David Sentelle, rejected this abrogation of one of our most fundamental rights, the right to go where we pleased along a public road without having to explain ourselves to the police.
The plan was called the Neighborhood Safety Zone, no doubt because Neighborhood No-Rights Zone sounded unpleasant. But the court wasn’t fooled.
The harm to the rights of appellants is apparent. It cannot be gainsaid that citizens have a right to drive upon the public streets of the District of Columbia or any other city absent a constitutionally sound reason for limiting their access. As our discussion of the likelihood of success has demonstrated, there is no such constitutionally sound bar in the NSZ checkpoint program. It is apparent that appellants’ constitutional rights are violated. It has long been established that the loss of constitutional freedoms, “for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.”
What strikes me as quite amazing is that there was any question whatsoever about the harm done to this basic right to move freely about the District of Columbia, or any city, town or burg, in this nation.
The curious part of this decision is that the initial analysis delved heavily into the law of checkpoints, as approved for such purposes as drunk driving and seatbelts, but disallowed for general crime deterrence. This is yet another example of the slippery slope, where courts carved out 4th Amendment exceptions to allow what were deemed minor intrusions into our freedom from unreasonable seizure to accommodate what was believed to be a socially important purpose. Sure, ridding the roads of drunk drivers is a worthy goal, but at the price of stopping law-abiding people doing nothing more than exercising their right to travel down a public road?
The underlying issue is that the checkpoint concept, one that might conceivably be deemed acceptable by many citizens who are willing to spend a few minutes of their time being subject to police scrutiny in the name of drunk-driving prevention, blurs the notion that we are free to go about our lives without police interference as long as we do nothing to justify their scrutiny. Checkpoints manifestly elevate order over freedom.
It’s not that police aren’t properly concerned with drunk driving. If someone drives down the road swerving, demonstrating the indicia of being under the influence such that he may harm others, turn on the sirens and nail the sucker. Go to it. But if I’m minding my own business, doing nothing wrong, living clean and sober, then what business do the police have in seizing me, even if only for 10 seconds of my time, to check for the potential of something for which no evidence exists? I’ve got a problem with being seized.
The roads belong to the people. We pay for them. We use them. We are entitled to use them. That the Trinidad neighborhood suffered from terrible violence reflects a lack of effective law enforcement policy coupled with disrespect for the law and other people. I wonder what breeds such disrespect? No doubt someone else will wonder why the residents of the neighborhood are such animals. They always see such people as animals, which offers an easier explanation for why bad things happen in bad neighborhoods.
But the residents of the Trinidad neighborhood, just like my neighbors and I, maintain the right to move freely down the road at will. They need not prove their identities to police. They need not explain their purpose for driving down a public road. They need not lose 10 seconds of their lives to answer a police officer’s inquiry. This is true when we are subjected to the gratuitous inquiry of the police officer without enough to occupy his time, and it’s true when a city comes up with a formalized plan to segregate a neighborhood as a war zone.
One might think that the right to move freely, so basic to our nature as Americans and so little different from the time when our basic rights were formally protected by enactment of the Bill of Rights, would still be in play more than two centuries later. The rules haven’t changed, and it’s appalling that a district court judge was so enamored of the police and the need for order that the Balkanization of the District of Columbia would be viewed as acceptable. It seems that we are destined to keep fighting the American revolution every day, lest our patriot forefathers have died in vain.
H/T Bashman, Eugene and Popehat
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Thank you for writing this article. ‘targeted’ individuals have charges bumped up on these ‘check point’ stops as well as at other times
using their authoritarian broad application of ‘probable cause’. They only need a ‘reason’ to stop, search, seize and arrest for illicit purposes.
Once arrested, we must ‘prove’ our innocence at great cost financially and emotionally.
Big Brother is here to stay if we the People don’t step up to the plate for REFORMS.
There is a JFK video on Utube circulating around the country on multiple websites and blogs. This speech was a public statement of his position as President to support the Free Press to investigate and report their findings as a protected right and he welcomed criticizm to the government He proposed to not support covert opperations or limiting liberties under the quise of National Security as this ‘cover’ allowed for illicit purposes. JFK proposed to not support any conduct that he envisioned would lead to a tyrannical government.
Our government has effectively stripped our Constitutional and bill of rights one after one over the last 15 (or better) years. They are now after our fundamental First Amendment Rights. Citizens are battling Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Religion and losing in courts all across the country. Web Sites are being pulled off the internet overnight and the Government is actively working to take control over and/or influence internet servers.
We are NOT a Free Society any longer. Grass roots organizations have sprug up all across this country to work for reforms and despite their Leaders being unjustly and egregiously retaliated against, others are stepping up to the plate to take their places.