A Police State in the Nation’s Capital
June 4, 2008 by Joshua Davis
Police in Washington, DC will soon begin sealing off entire neighborhoods prone to high crime. Under the new program main thoroughfares would be blocked, and any vehicles entering such a neighborhood would have to present an ID, which would either prove a person lived in the neighborhood, or else a person would have to state their reason for being their, like church or visiting friends. Right now the idea will just be applied to high crime neighborhoods, but still it seems might totalitarian. The DC Examiner has the story:
Under an executive order expected to be announced today, police Chief Cathy L. Lanier will have the authority to designate “Neighborhood Safety Zones.” At least six officers will man cordons around those zones and demand identification from people coming in and out of them. Anyone who doesn’t live there, work there or have “legitimate reason” to be there will be sent away or face arrest, documents obtained by The Examiner show.
Lanier has been struggling to reverse D.C.’s spiraling crime rate but has been forced by public outcry to scale back several initiatives including her “All Hands on Deck” weekends and plans for warrantless, door-to-door searches for drugs and guns.
Under today’s proposal, the no-go zones will last up to 10 days, according to internal police documents. Front-line officers are already being signed up for training on running the blue curtains.
The plan isn’t purely a concation of the police department, the DC’s attorney general stays he believes the program is consitional, and besides he says it’s been used in other cities. I wonder what those “other cities” are? Moscow, Beijing, or Warsaw anyone?
Right now this may be a problem in the ghettos of DC, but surely if the police in DC get away with it we’ll see it expanding to other areas and cities. With immigration hysteria on the rise I have to wonder when the next news story reports on police locking down neighborhoods and searching for illegal immigrants.
Honestly, I don’t care if this program has been used in other cities, and I don’t care if it has been ruled constitutional (though there seems to be no evidence that it has been), just because something is constitutional does not mean the police should do it. There has got to be a way to contain crime without infringing on a person’s right to go where they please. This system just isn’t right.
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The whole country’s a police state to some extent.
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That’s true, but in most areas you only have to pass through checkpoints on New Years day.
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