Make-work policing: At a time when crime remains at an all-time low, it's telling that a police officer has nothing better to do than follow a driver seemingly guilty of nothing more than enjoying loud music.
Warrantless entry: That foot in the door is a tactic that, while technically illegal, is used frequently by police attempting to finagle their way into a home and sidestep the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement.
The definition of reasonable: Although the Fourth Amendment prohibits warrantless and unreasonable searches and seizures of "persons, houses, papers, and effects", where we run into real trouble is when the government starts dancing around what constitutes a "reasonable" search. Of course, that all depends on who gets to decide what is reasonable. There's even a balancing test that weighs the intrusion on a person's right to privacy against the government's interests, which include public safety.
Too often, the scales weigh in the government's favor.
End runs around the law: The courts, seemingly more concerned with marching in lockstep with the police state than upholding the rights of the people, have provided police with a long list of exceptions that have gutted the Fourth Amendment's once-robust privacy protections.
Exceptions to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement allow the police to carry out warrantless searches: if someone agrees to the search; in order to ferret out weapons or evidence during the course of an arrest; if police think someone is acting suspiciously and may be armed; during a brief investigatory stop; if a cop sees something connected to a crime in plain view; if police are in hot pursuit of a suspect who flees into a building; if they believe a vehicle has contraband; in an emergency where there may not be time to procure a warrant; and at national borders and in airports.
In other words, almost anything goes when it comes to all the ways in which the government can now invade your home and lay siege to your property.
Thus we tumble down that slippery slope that might have started out with a genuine concern for public safety and the well-being of the citizenry only to end up as a self-serving expansion of the government's powers that makes a mockery of the Fourth Amendment while utterly disregarding the rights of "we the people."
Frankly, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, it's a wonder we have any property interests, let alone property rights, left to protect.
Yet as John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the United States, rightly observed: "No power on earth has a right to take our property from us without our consent."
Source: .ly/384IzIp
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