By Seth Richardson
There’s a very common misunderstanding about the Fourth Amendment, particularly on the part of Catherine Roper, a Pennsylvania ACLU attorney, who really ought to know better. Roper complains in an Associated Press story about the NYPD’s intelligence-gathering practices on college campuses in the Northeast concerning Muslims student groups, that the NYPD “should be spending their time looking at the more specific behaviors that ought to draw their attention and make them investigate a person or a group” rather than gathering intelligence on and infiltrating Muslim college student groups simply because they are Muslims.
Here’s the problem with Ms. Roper’s argument; the police cannot distinguish those groups that are harmlessly exercising their civil rights from those groups that are engaging in unlawful acts or are planning terrorism without spending some time monitoring and getting to know all the groups and their members.
The Fourth Amendment explicitly prohibits “unreasonable” searches, not all searches, and not all law-enforcement intelligence gathering efforts. The Supreme Court says that an “unreasonable search” takes place when police physically invade private property or violate a person’s “reasonable expectation of privacy” without a warrant.
But while the police have a duty not to violate a reasonable expectation of privacy, they also have a duty to serve and protect the public by investigating and keeping tabs on potential threats to public safety.
Quite simply, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in the actions of any campus political, religious or social club when a police agent is a member of that group.
The parameters of police surveillance of potentially seditious terrorist groups and other criminals were set back in the 1920s, when federal agents infiltrated criminal gangs during Prohibition clear through the 1960s when police undercover agents infiltrated groups like the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and other revolutionary student groups who were advocating violent overthrow of the government and were bombing, killing and maiming people nationwide. A notable example of such domestic terrorism where more infiltration and surveillance was needed is the case of SDS founder William Ayers, a friend of Barack Obama, who admitted to blowing up police stations and other terrorist acts in the 60s. He’s an unrepentant terrorist who should still be the subject of FBI surveillance.
The hoary old canard tossed out by Ms. Roper that it’s improper “religious profiling” for the NYPD to scrutinize Muslim student groups ignores the obvious and well-established fact that Muslim student groups are some of the primary places where Islamic radicalism, recruiting and terrorist plotting takes place. Is this true of all Muslim student groups? Of course not. But it is nonetheless true of some such groups, and the NYPD has every right, and indeed a duty to winnow the wheat from the chaff by infiltrating and gathering intelligence on such groups, within the strict boundaries of the Fourth Amendment, in order to determine which is which so they can focus on the real threats.
The adage in gold mining is “gold is where you find it.” The corollary is that you won’t find gold unless you go looking for it, and in the process you’re going to look at a lot of rocks that aren’t gold before you find a nugget. The same thing applies to police intelligence investigations of potential terrorist or criminal groups. They have to look at a large number of groups to determine which ones are harmless and which ones are threats, and then focus their efforts on the threats.
This obviously means that “innocent” individuals will be the subject of police interest and scrutiny, but the fact of the matter is that there is no constitutional right to be free of police interest and scrutiny, there is only a right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure by the police. Those groups and individuals who are innocent of any wrongdoing or potential threat will be of interest only peripherally to the police, and once the police are satisfied they are not a threat, the surveillance will cease and be focused on the actual threat groups.
Is it “religious profiling” for the NYPD to focus its attention and efforts on (in this case) Islamic groups? Yes, it most certainly is, but then again there’s nothing inherently wrong with or illegal about religious, political, ethnic or racial profiling if the religious beliefs, political activities, ethnic practices or race of an individual are primary aspects of suspect identification. If the witness description of a suspect in an armed robbery is that of a Caucasian male, it’s not racial or sexual profiling for the police to be looking more closely at white males than black females. The same is true of any other suspect descriptor, and unfortunately for peaceable Muslims, the violent radical terrorists within their ranks have certain traits and behaviors in common with innocent Muslims. That’s not a reason to ignore the fact that radical Muslims intent on terrorism, or recruiting others into terrorism, are highly likely to be found associating with other Muslims.
As a side note, I don’t hear Ms. Roper complaining about the FBI’s infiltration and surveillance of right-wing radical groups like the Freemen or various other “militia” groups, which smacks of rank hypocrisy to me.
In the case of Muslims, the vast majority are peaceful people, but there is a small, extremely radical and violent sub-set of Muslims who comprise a clear and present danger to national security, and the primary characteristic that binds all of these dangerous radicals together happens to be the religion of Islam. Just as the justification for infiltrating the SDS with undercover police agents was the primary characteristic that bound together murderous radicals of the 1960s, radical Marxism, the justification for gathering intelligence on Muslims is that one of the primary characteristics of violent Islamic extremists is Islam.
It’s therefore far from “unreasonable” for the police to show interest in Islamic groups on college campuses and for them to lawfully infiltrate and gather intelligence on their activities in order to separate the sheep from the goats, provided that the police do so within the well-established rules for such activities, which have been honed and refined in the four decades since the SDS was routinely infiltrated by police agents on college campuses nationwide.
The activities of any group that unknowingly invites a police undercover agent into the group are Fourth Amendment fair game for intelligence gathering. The police are not required to identify themselves as police officers in such situations, any more than an undercover officer infiltrating a drug cartel or organized crime network is required to do so. The invitation negates any reasonable expectation of privacy.
And if the activities of the group turn out to be harmless and lawful, then the police intelligence gathering will actually benefit the group by freeing them from continuing surveillance, no one’s privacy will have been unlawfully invaded, and the police will be able to better do their duty to ferret out and destroy actual Islamic terrorist cells on university campuses.
And there is little question that such Islamic terrorist cells exist on our university campuses. That much we do know.
© 2012 Altnews
What I’m having a hard time understanding is that there are men and women in uniform that can lie in their reports and under oath in our courts. They can then go home to their family/friends without any remorse that the fabricated crimes they arrest people for are destroying families. They take mothers and fathers from their children. They separate people who love each other and have worked hard for what they have. They create the likelihood that these children ,as well as the adults, will face hardships like ridicule from their peers, difficulty finding employment, difficulty renting/buying a home or securing a bank loan. Just imagine all the problems they create when they lie in court and these lies result in one of the parents being removed from a child’s life. ( remember the Hooter’s waitress who was a single mom?)How many people have lost their self esteem, lost others respect, fell into depression and in the end caused unimaginable pain to everyone around them by taking their own life? All because of police lies.
I’m just a simple man without any education on human psychology or human behavior. Even if I did, my mind would never understand how these men and women can put on a badge and a gun, go to work to serve citizens, lie about the actions and conversations of these citizens, and go home without any regret or remorse for the lives they destroyed that day. The single mother who worked at Hooter’s was extremely fortunate. How many innocent lives were needlessly altered or destroyed before and since the Hooter’s snafu ? How many more lives will be impacted in the future ? My guess would be way too many.
I’m just a simple man
“If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about” – I have heard this trick-bag statement as well and my response is No you are not searching anything without a warrant. The Bill of Rights is so easy to read and understand I cannot understand how it is even debated. Undercover officers are notorious for creating crime and also for losing their sense of identity thus becoming useless to law enforcement. There is one time a person should talk to police and that is never. That silly “gold” analogy is wrong as well. Gold occurs in certain places under very specific circumstances. Go ahead and just start digging a hole in your yard, you will find gold is what you imply. No. Wrong. The Second Amendment is the one that should be heeded by those who think they run things. That Amendment is for citizens to use in order to tell government we have the real power so don’t push us too far. Leave our Rights alone. Gasbags in black robes think they are gods but soon that will change.
The police are only required to have a warrant if they intend to search you, your home, or your private papers. On the other hand, so long as you’re in public, and are doing things publicly, they have every right to keep an eye on you.
Police are under no obligation to shut their eyes to what’s going on around them, that much the Supreme Court has made clear.
And the gold analogy is intended to point out that terrorists are just like gold, sometimes you know where they are, but most times you don’t, so you have to keep looking where there is no gold to see if you can find some.
Police Car Aucrions…
[...]The 4th Amendment is not a bar to police intelligence gathering – The Broadside : Colorado Springs Gazette, CO[...]…
The Constitution and Declaration of Independence also provide citizens the right to resist tyranny by force of arms,,Who’s to say who is right crossing either line then….The abuses of local and Federal police agency’s during the 1950′s and 1960′s were much more egregious than the British system of taxation…
First off, who gets to define what the word unreasonable means? My take, after reading what you’ve written here is that, most certainly, it shouldn’t be you. “Newspeak” anyone?
Second, there have been numerous, though mostly buried in the press (read-they were caught), cases of law enforcement infiltration where the express intent of the operation was to find willing dupes to carry out acts of “terror” to justify more infiltration. There have been operations of more notorious fame (which I’ll leave nameless, but if you’ve been paying attention, they’re obvious) that were wholly owned subsidiaries of law enforcement, again, for the sole purpose of justifying more infiltration over an all encompassing spectrum of suspects.
If you want to head down the slippery slope of the end justifying the means, there’s a special kind of tyranny waiting for you at the bottom of the hill.
Happy sledding!
“If you dont want the police to be interested in what you are doing, dont do things police find interesting”-even though this is in direct reference to search and seizure I am repulsed at what our law enforcement get away with because they are just that. We moved away two years ago from the Springs but the city officials and your officers had a hay-day with passing out tickets to folks on false charges (I imagine to pay for that fine renovation at Woodmen and Academy, seeing the citizens did not approve your tax hike). I recv’d a ticket for speeding through that mentioned intersection which was was so trumped up. I was NOT-the officer had lights on me going through that intersection, from a dead stop mind you yet stated I was going 51 MPH. If I had not been so rattled because of being in a courtroom, I would of remembered on the stand that he states he was not equipped with moving radar from the car. He states he was at the end of the Home Depot bldg. and of course the most HONORABLE judge really did not care, there was money to collect (and of course there is always an attorney provided for the lawful policeman) . We were in the middle of losing our home, my husband had already lost his job and that ticket was more painful to pay than anything I can remember paying in my life. I try very hard NEVER to go without my cruise control on any more. I wish there were people out there who really did care to help people that was in my situation, to check the actions of our city official, judges, police, etc. but this is so widespread throughout our nation, I am believing it is a thing of the past, something our nation once stood on but has become but a memory. You want “gold nuggets”, start there.