On the day SDNY Judge Shira Sheindlin  certified a class action on behalf of the hundreds of thousand of people, mostly black and Hispanic, who were stopped and frisked because a cop felt like it,  Fishtown’s Leo Mulvihill  pointed me toward an  NPR radio broadcast of Richard Cohen on the subject.

The NPR Talk of the Nation broadcast followed upon Cohen’s  Washington Post column on the same subject.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has a new kind of crime statistic. It is not the astoundingly low number of murders committed in his fair city — 471 in 2009 vs. about 2,000 per year in the 1980s — but murders not committed in the last decade: 5,600. Those people are alive today by the grace of God and the policing policies of the Bloomberg administration, particularly what is known as stop-and-frisk. New York City is heaven on earth possibly because it is a certain kind of hell for young black and Hispanic men.

I didn’t think I would ever do this, but here I am: There should be a law against this.  The law should prohibit anyone from espousing something in public to large audiences that makes them inherently stupider.  The law should prohibit people from offering an opinion on a subject about which they are clueless. The law should punish the murder of brain cells. 

Richard Cohen, j’accuse.

Compared to the relatively benign column, the NPR broadcast made my eyes well up with tears, my ears ring and my fingers twitch.  After the typical humblebrag beginnings of “I don’t know nothin’ about birthin’ no babies,” Cohen goes on the get most of the facts wrong and yet elevate ignorance to new heights.  His opinion, baseless as he falsely admitted, was nonetheless worthy of assertion under the last refuge of the ignorant, common sense.

It’s a trade-off, Cohen informs, between all the people who aren’t dead today because of the stop and frisk policy, and all the people who suffered the stop and frisk.  Cohen readily concedes that he’s not likely to be subject to it, and wouldn’t like it much if he was, but since it saved lives, proven by the absence of dead bodies littering the streets of Manhattan, it’s something we can’t dismiss.

Maybe Cohen was sick that day in third grade when the teacher, Mrs. Crabtree, mentioned it. That happens, but it’s a good reason not to write about it. The “it” is the Constitution.  The “it” is the foundation of our government.  The “it” is not subject to individual approval or “common sense” revisionism.  In other words, columnists for the Washington Post who go on radio to talk about crap they know nothing about do not get to opine that the application of the Constitution to the government is subject to either their approval or their imaginings of common sense.

Of course order and security would be enhanced if the people had no rights and the government was all powerful. This isn’t exactly higher order thinking.  But Cohen, when that bunch of dry good merchants decided to form a better union, they made some choices to guide how that government would function going forward.  No one told you?  Sorry, but it’s all over the internet. 

The United States Constitution, Fourth Amendment, establishes a value judgment upon which this nation was formed.  It provides that police cannot stop and frisk people at will. Done deal. This is not subject to either popular approval or your severely limited grasp and equivocation.

Yes, the stop and frisk program is more effective than adherence to the Constitution at preventing crime. So too would be anal cavity searches at will. Summary executions would also work pretty darned well. There is a laundry list of things the police could do that would have an impact, to at least some degree, on crime.

And yet the Constitution says they can’t.

It sucks? It’s not your cup of tea, Cohen?  There’s always Singapore. I hear it’s lovely this time of year.  They have no Fourth Amendment prohibiting the government from flexing its muscles at will to prevent the potential of crime by allowing people to be free from baseless searches.  Sure, apartments are hard to find, but isn’t it worth it to feel safe?

What strikes me as incredible is that the newspaper that broke Watergate would give space to a column that makes people stupider.  And if that’s not bad enough, the NPR puts Richard Cohen on air in the apparent hope that its funding won’t be cut. 

Prefer safety over rights all you want, and point out the 5600 people alive today but for the flagrant violation of civil rights.  There are many people who agree, despite the fact that it’s based on an imaginary argument.  But to suggest that this is an open question, a toss-up for fans of security to decide, rather than a facial violation of our Constitution is just fundamentally ignorant.  If you want to be a pundit, you don’t get to be ignorant, and you don’t get to make other people ignorant.

I would proclaim you guilty of my imaginary law, but then, in America, you have a right to trial. Unlike you, I didn’t miss the day in third grade when Mrs. Crabtree mentioned the Constitution.