Boston: The birthplace and murder scene of America
I keep harping on this Boston lockdown thing because it’s serious. We can’t put this genie back in the bottle. It’s one thing to cordon off a house with a warrant, probable cause and the expectation that crime is happening there. It’s entirely another to just blanketly get all “none shall pass” on everyone who happens to live in the same general vicinity of a suspect. If we don’t stop this stuff now, it never will stop.
In fact, Alan said:
The warrantless house to house manhunt will be the new no-knock raid.
This last Sunday, a local man murdered his wife and then ran away. Emulating Boston, they locked down the neighborhood to find one man
This is not good. Nannies are already chiming in that we must re-evaluate the bill of rights by saying there isn’t one.
Turning neighborhoods into prisons is not what the authorities should be doing. Now, granted, tracking this guy down is a tough spot for the cops but the police these days are entirely too quick to err on the side of trampling civil rights.
And that’s unacceptable.
April 22nd, 2013 at 8:01 pm
Hear ye, hear ye!
So how and where do we get a prosecution going? I noticed that didn’t appear to be any resistance to the lockdown in Boston. If there was I haven’t seen it reported. Too bad we’re already a country of mesmerized sheep, huh?
April 22nd, 2013 at 9:45 pm
So how would this have been handled? Cordon off the area? I can assure you that if you had come out door with your sporting rifle, you would have been a grease spot. I am not defending the lock down. I want to know what the alternative would have been. Also, one of my grad students remarked that the police seemed to be pretty efficient in their house to house techniques. Wonder where they polished their skills? Kabul?
April 22nd, 2013 at 9:49 pm
I would handle it by dealing with it at the time and then suing them later. I hope the ACLU is on this one.
And, sadly, pics from Kabul and Watertown are about the same, no?
April 22nd, 2013 at 10:19 pm
Well… This “lockdown” thing is out of the norm only in that it was used this time for a possible threat of more bombs. Many locales in many areas do larger-scale lockouts a few times every winter. In 1978 the whole State was under lockdown, in that [with a couple of exceptions] cars were not allowed on the roads. Nor is it new, roadblocks and searches of all transportation have been common for a long time – watch rime films from the 1930s, for example.
April 22nd, 2013 at 10:20 pm
Oops, “rime” —> “crime”
April 22nd, 2013 at 11:27 pm
There is no suit. It is legally with the public safety exception. I sympathize with the discomfort of the search, but there is no case. We “lefties” have been warning about this change in state power for years. I can cite chapter and verse.
April 23rd, 2013 at 7:42 am
John A,
None of those examples you mentioned are “lock-downs” and certainly not in the way that the Boston police action played out. Under no weather event has the .gov banned people from setting foot into their yards. Those events never involved a house-to-house search at gunpoint.
This is a novel act. Yes current jurisprudence does recognize a security exemption, but the facts of the cases underlying those decisions have been MUCH more localized (i.e. “Your honor, we saw the perp run into 123 Cedar Ln, so we decided to search it, we didn’t have time to get a warrant.”)
April 23rd, 2013 at 8:31 am
Anyone else remember Fifth Element? This is a police control.
April 23rd, 2013 at 4:20 pm
Metulj,
Have you ‘lefties’ been ‘warning about change’ or ‘pushing for this change’?
April 23rd, 2013 at 6:40 pm
“Cordon and Search”, “Cordon and Knock”, and “Cordon and Kick.”
Nice to know we are living in an insurgency, so these techniques are justified.
April 24th, 2013 at 12:02 am
Cubby: yes. I can give you a 200 item reading list about neoliberal state power and violence starting with hannah arendt and ending with james tyner.
April 24th, 2013 at 10:46 am
Metulj…
Whoever told you that there was a “public safety exemption” to the Constitution that allowed cops to pull this kind of crap was blowing some heavy-duty pharmaceutical smoke.
That -might- fly if you were kicking in the door of a house on fire, to rescue those inside. That would fly if you were evacuating a public area. That does not fly if you are entering private areas or ordering private citizens to move or not move for the specific purpose of searching for someone or something. The only, ONLY exemption that -might- work is the “hot pursuit” exemption, but that only applies if you -see- the suspect enter a building, -and- you are right on his heels, -and- there is reason to believe the suspect will escape in the time it’ll take to get a warrant, -and- there is reason to believe that escape poses a greater danger to the public and their rights than your infringement. In short, you must have seen the suspect enter that specific building, reasonably believe that he poses an imminent danger to the public, and reasonably believe that the risk of flight is great enough you can’t wait for a warrant.
It’s very specific.
It doesn’t take a temporary declaration of martial law to find one person. Nor does searching for one man, not even a murder or terror suspect, justify shutting down city blocks, confining people to their houses, or forcibly searching door-to-door. I’ve helped search for, track, and catch suspects. We got most of them. Some, they got away. That’s the price we pay, for having little things like rights and personal liberty. There’s just some things cops can’t do, and places cops can’t go without a warrant. And that’s how it should be.
April 24th, 2013 at 3:23 pm
The most important thing to remember is that the “lockdown” DIDN’T WORK. IT FAILED. We caught the suspect AS SOON AS THEY LET PEOPLE OUT.
The police were a complete and total failure. He was discovered by the militia.