morningcupofwolfsblood:

nietsneppilk:

smdxn:

With Police in Schools, More Children in Court

As school districts across the country consider placing more police officers in schools, youth advocates and judges are raising alarm about what they have seen in the schools where officers are already stationed…

[T]he most striking impact of school police officers so far, critics say, has been a surge in arrests or misdemeanor charges for essentially nonviolent behavior — including scuffles, truancy and cursing at teachers — that sends children into the criminal courts.

“There is no evidence that placing officers in the schools improves safety,” said Denise C. Gottfredson, a criminologist at the University of Maryland who is an expert in school violence. “And it increases the number of minor behavior problems that are referred to the police, pushing kids into the criminal system.”

Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of students are arrested or given criminal citations at schools each year. A large share are sent to court for relatively minor offenses, with black and Hispanic students and those with disabilities disproportionately affected, according to recent reports from civil rights groups, including the Advancement Project, in Washington, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, in New York.

we had cops at my high school and it made the school less safe. when cops are around there is no such place as a space. they are the grown up versions of the scum bag who raped me they are the same as the people who beat me up and called me a faggot, who doused my friend in lighter fluid and lit him on fire for not believing in their god

It REALLY pains me that I just assumed all public high schools had police officers. 

EFF to Texas High Court: A Cell Phone Isn’t a Pair of Pants

“Is a cell phone really a pair of trousers?”

That’s the question posed in a Texas case dealing with whether the police need a warrant to search the contents of a cell phone sitting in a jail’s property room. In a new amicus brief we filed in the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, we explain police need a warrant before searching an arrested person’s cell phone.

Teenager Anthony Granville was arrested at his high school for a misdemeanor and booked into the county jail. All of his belongings, including his cell phone, were taken from him and placed in the jail’s property room while he was locked up. Three hours after his arrest, a different officer than the one who arrested Granville at the high school went into the property room and, without a search warrant, looked through Granville’s phone in search of evidence connected to another, unrelated misdemeanor felony.

The trial court suppressed the evidence taken from the phone, finding the officer had plenty of time and opportunity to obtain a search warrant and no exigent circumstance justified the search. The state appealed to the Texas Court of Appeals, arguing that Granville had no expectation of privacy in the contents of his cell phone while it was in the jailhouse, noting that looking through the phone was no different than looking at a person’s clothes when they are booked into jail. The appellate court disagreed with the government’s analogy, finding the amount of information stored on mobile devices make a cell phone search far more invasive than a search of clothing. Now the case is in front of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and we’ve filed an amicus brief along with EFF-Austin, the Texas Civil Rights Project and the ACLU of Texas urging the high court to affirm the decision of the two courts before it that found the government’s warrantless search violated the Fourth Amendment.

In our amicus brief we explain the government had no excuse for not obtaining a warrant before searching Granville’s phone. A person doesn’t surrender their expectation of privacy in the contents of their phone once the phone is in the hands of jail officials. Plus none of the exceptions to the search warrant requirement applied. This wasn’t a search “incident to arrest” since it took place hours after Granville was arrested, when the phone was out of his control. And it wasn’t an “inventory search” because once the phone itself was inventoried and secured by the police, there was no need to inventory the data on the phone. Plus, a inventory search can’t be used as a pretext for a clearly investigatory search, which this certainly was. 

Trying to pigeonhole the search of a cell phone into legal precedent addressing something quite different only highlights the need to have the law account for technological changes. As Professor Orin Kerr observed recently, “thanks to changing technology and its widespread adoption, searching a person meant one thing in 1973 and means something quite different today.” Courts are slowly recognizing this. In United States v. Cotterman, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that given the amount of information stored on electronic devices, border agents must have a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity before engaging in a “forensic examination” of an electronic device. Part of the court’s justification was that although the amount of items a person can carry in physical luggage is necessarily limited, the same isn’t true with electronic devices. A broad electronic search policy would be the equivalent of searching luggage for “not only what the bag contained on the current trip, but everything it had ever carried.” 

The appellate court’s obvious conclusion that “a cell phone is not a pair of pants” follows this correct line of thinking and makes clear that our privacy rights don’t become eviscerated simply because invasive searches not contemplated 30 years ago can now happen with just a few taps on a screen.

therepublitarian:

“When Rand Paul emerged on the national scene in 2010, staffers at places like The Cato Institute and Reason backed him more enthusiastically than any other U.S. Senate candidate. Like all Tea Party-affiliated pols, Paul favored smaller government, tax cuts, and free-market reforms. Unlike Marco Rubio or Christine O’Donnell, the Kentucky Republican was expected by right-leaning libertarians to oppose the bipartisan excesses of the post-9/11 era. As Radley Balko argued that spring, Paul would be better on civil liberties than President Obama and most Senate Democrats. Few non-libertarians believed him, as evidenced by the skeptical replies of progressive writers Adam Serwer* and Jamelle Bouie, savvy civil libertarians in their own right.

Three years later, it is beyond dispute: Paul is a leading opponent of civil-liberties abrogations, executive-power excesses, and militarism. Safe to say, after last week’s filibuster, that his stands on those issues are the most visible and consequential that he has taken in the Senate. Even prior to that 13-hour spectacle, Paul mounted high-profile, sometimes lonely efforts to reform the Patriot Act; formally end the president’s authorization to wage war in Iraq; reform drug laws; prevent indefinite detention; extend Fourth Amendment protections to electronic communications; require warrants for drone surveillance; reform overzealous TSA screening procedures; and stop an anti-piracy bill that would have onerously infringed on free expression online.

He’s also opposed calls to wage war in Libya, Syria, and Iran.       

In light of this record, the establishment press ought to reflect upon the fact that its 2010 coverage utterly failed to anticipate the most important consequences of electing Paul to the Senate. Go back, as I just did, and read every story The New York Times published about him. Its coverage was representative: The paper paid little attention to his anti-war, pro-civil liberties, pro-checks-and-balances proclivities, though those issues were certain to loom large between 2010 and 2016; it paid some attention to the political import of a possible victory by a Tea Party Republican; and it focused intensely on Paul’s position on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, legislation that passed when he was two years old and certainly won’t be revisited in the foreseeable future. (Another landmark law from that era, the Voting Rights Act, does face a serious challenge in the Supreme Court right now.)

Revisiting this coverage is important because it helps to clarify the flaws in the way that many journalists cover libertarianism generally — even if you think, as I do, that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was extremely important legislation that ought to be celebrated by all Americans for the good it did; and that, if better executed, covering Paul’s position on the subject would have been legitimate. Unfortunately, the actual coverage unfolded in a way that left the audience ill-informed. 

The particulars won’t surprise anyone familiar with the template the political press uses to cover libertarians. As Chris Beam wrote in 2010, “For all the talk about casting off government shackles, libertarianism is still considered the crazy uncle of American politics: loud and cocky and occasionally profound but always a bit unhinged.” He nailed the perception among journalists.

One consequence is something I call reductio ad libertarium.  

On a given issue, a journalist confronted with the libertarian position, like legalizing drugs, objects by pointing out the most extreme possible consequence: “So I could go buy heroin at the store?” Fair enough, except that there are no analogous challenges to the establishment positions. A candidate whose stance is that drugs must remain illegal is never asked, “So you’re okay with imprisoning millions of people, empowering violent street gangs, destabilizing multiple foreign countries, militarizing municipal police forces, and still having ubiquitous drug use?”“

New York Police Union and NYPD Work Together To Generate Quotas

Audio obtained by The Nation confirms that New York City’s police union cooperated with the NYPD in setting arrest quotas for the department’s officers. According to some officers and critics of quotas, the practice has played a direct role in increasing the number of stop-and-frisk encounters since Mayor Michael Bloomberg came to office. Patrolmen who spoke to The Nation explained that the pressure from superiors to meet quota goals has caused some officers to seek out or even manufacture arrests to avoid department retaliation.

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