4th Amend.

[Glenn E. Meyer]

Mrs. Clinton suggests:

Mrs. Clinton offered a few general notions on ways to redress the situation, from
increasing the number of minority officers on the city's police force, to expanding
community policing programs, to financing research into new technology that
would allow the police to electronically scan passersby for firearms, negating the
intrusion of the frisk.


** Seems to me that just scanning random
passersby is rather problematic. The technology does exist and there are debates
in the law literature about this issue.

I suppose it is a good thing. Now cops when
racially profiling people will not have an excuse to shoot them when they panic. They will know it is a wallet.

However, being a minority with a CHL license will take on an exciting new aspect in many cities. Given that minorities will be scanned more (sorry, they will), the legal gun carrier will meet the pavement and cuffed a good deal it seems to me.

Oh, wait - racial profiling is bad.

Oh, who holds the scanner when you are confronting the suspect in the doorway of the house. Can you hang it under your gun like
a Surefire?

Very confused.

 

[Jeff White]

This technology is a long way from being ready and affordable. As you said in the other post, there are definate 4th Amendment implications.

Hiring more minorities, good idea but Diallo could have just as easily as happened if all involved were the same race. I think the Clintons are trying to make a racial problem out of what is really a training problem.

The thing that really bothers me about all of this is that we seem to be wanting to live in a risk free society. Don't get me wrong, what happened was tragic and every reasonable thing should be done to prevent it's happening again. I think it is just plain pandering for politicians at the national level to involve themselves in local issues like this. A more reasonable respons from the Clintons would have been to say they would see if they could find some DOJ grant money to pay for additional training for NYPDs officers if the NYPD so desired. Or maybe that they would have the FBI study shootings of this type, consult with the finest trainers in the private sector (the same ones they hire to train their people from time to time) and develop a better training program for all police officers.

I'm not going to say that all police officers are perfect and can do no wrong....but we need to understand that as long as we have violent street crime and we send armed men of any race into harms way to fight it, incident like this may happen. I'm not saying it's right, but we need to remember that we are dealing with human beings and human beings are far from perfect. There are too many who will take any type of incident and twist it for their own purposes.

And as a society we have to start recognizing that s*&t happens. There isn't a government solution for every risk that life entails. From the citizens of a small town demanding a stop light at an intersection where a senior citizen stepped out into traffic and was tragically killed (there was never a vehicular or pedestrian fatality there before), to the leader of the free world saying that his trigger lock proposal would have stopped a six year old living in a crack house from getting his hands on a stolen gun he found there, to the burgeoning move to limit size and height of 4x4 trucks and SUVs, we need to slow down and say that sometime no matter what we do, bad things will sometimes happen.

Jeff

[This message has been edited by Jeff White (edited March 06, 2000).]

 

[Futo Inu]

I guess (and hope) you're kidding when you say it's a good thing. This debate has been ongoing, and fortunately we have the ACLU to help us on this one. In my view, it's a clear violation of the 4th to be scanned on the street without probable cause that one has committed a crime - it's an intimate search of the body, no more or less, and should not occur without a very good reason - lots of crime with weapons ain't nearly enough of a good reason.