Quote:Everything in that video is a 4th Amendment violation. Cops should NEVER be permitted to stop random people and search them whether driving, walking, or entering a public place like the airport or stadium.

 

This whole thing kind of reminds me an incident that happened in Tallahassee about 15 years ago...

 

A few key facts. I was living in Maryland at the time and got ironically sent to Tallahassee for work. It's ironic because I was born and raised in Tallahassee but left when I was 13 (I'm now 41). Anyway, I worked for a government contractor and had just picked my wire transfer for my weekly per diem and decided I wanted to take a walk to Sun Trust, which was about half a mile from where I was staying, to deposit it. As I'm walking from the hotel to the bank, a cop car pulls up onto the curb in front of the capital building and a cop gets out shining a light in my face (it's about 8pm or so and getting dark).

 

He asks me where I'm going and I tell him to the bank to make a deposit. He asks for my license and since I have a MD license he asks what I'm doing there, I tell him I'm there for work and that I'm staying at the hotel a few blocks back. He doesn't seem to like my answer since he asked me three different times during the course of our interaction why I was there and at the end he mentioned that a local business had been robbed and that I fit the description of the perp...which turned out to be [BLEEP] because they caught the guy 2 hours later and he was 4" taller and about 100 lbs heavier than I am. The only commonality was that I happen to be a black male within a 3 mile radius from where the robbery occurred. He ran my license, which took entirely too long considering there's nothing on my record and seemed genuinely saddened he didn't have anything to hem me up on. He even followed me to the bank and watched me make my deposit from his car before driving off.

 

I'd never had much of an opinion on cops before as I'd never really had to deal with them but that incident, to this very day, makes me inherently not trust a word that comes out of a cop's mouth as it pertains to the investigation of an actual crime. It's tales like mine that make people not trust the police. I'm sure there are good cops out there who genuinely want to defend citizens, uphold the law and help people...but I can't help but think they are in the minority.

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