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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16205 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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Stealing this from @ToaKraka in the FF thread:

A 911 call is made regarding a robbery perpetrated at gunpoint by three juvenile males in black clothing. One mile away from the location of the reported robbery, the responding officers find two juvenile males—one in all black, and another, KC, wearing a black shirt and mask and gray pants. The officers pull over alongside the juveniles and start walking toward them while shining a flashlight at them. KC starts walking away. An officer steps in front of KC, blocking his path, and asks him what's in his waistband. KC discards the object in his waistband (a gun) and runs away, but is quickly apprehended. He is charged with various delinquencies.

The trial judge grants KC's motion to suppress the evidence. The officers fully detained him, rather than casually speaking with him, when they shined a flashlight on him and blocked his path; and they did not have reasonable suspicion to detain him, since the description given in the 911 call was vague and KC didn't even match it. (The caller didn't even provide a direction in which the assailants fled. Did the officers have the power to detain all juvenile males wearing a single article of black clothing within a one-mile radius of the robbery? No.)

Our own BJ Campbell wrote that this is one of the important differences between the US and Western Europe. A German or British police officer would have the power to detain all juvenile males wearing a single article of black clothing within a one-mile radius of the robbery and physical evidence wouldn't be suppressed even if obtained without following the proper trail of investigation.

Is the USA shooting itself in the foot there? What will it lose if it changes its legal norms to lower the bar on probable cause and evidence suppression?

Courts have been making the definition of seizure or detention very expansive. I know of a couple cases in my home state of Washington.

In State v Sum they ruled that an officer waking a man sleeping in a vehicle, asking for identification, and saying he was investigating a stolen vehicle, constituted seizure. They vacated Sum's conviction for giving a false name subsequent to the seizure. They also added a racial component to the law's hypothetical reasonable observer, "an objective observer is aware that implicit, institutional, and unconscious biases."

The Washington State Supreme Court ruled in State v Meredith, relying on the racial dimension introduced by Sum, that officers asking for proof of payment from someone on a bus constituted a seizure, and that the officers lacked cause for the seizure. The decision vacated his conviction for giving a false name subsequent to the seizure. The lead opinion stated that fare enforcement has a “known, racially disproportionate impact” and later said its holding served “to mitigate the known, racially disproportionate impact of such fare enforcement practices."

In both of these cases the stakes were low. Meredith had already served the 58 day sentence that was vacated. The details of Sum's sentence aren't available, but it was also already served. Both were misdemeanors.

In both cases advocacy orgs like the ACLU pursued the cases on behalf of the defendants. Funnily enough the region's transit orgs filed amici briefs in favor of Meredith.

In both cases we had men who were already making net negative contributions to society, and who had their stupidity amplified by well funded organizations to make it even more difficult to rein in the behaviors of men like themselves. The defendants don't even have to show up for the apellate court hearings. I had ChatGPT try to find evidence that they did attend, and it was unable to find any.

Sum

As set forth in this court’s precedent, the seizure inquiry is an objective test in which the allegedly seized person has the burden to show that a seizure occurred. To aid courts in the application of this test, we now clarify that a person is seized for purposes of article I section 7 [of the state constitution] if, based on the totality of the circumstances, an objective observer could conclude that the person was not free to leave, to refuse a request, or to otherwise terminate the encounter due to law enforcement’s display of authority or use of physical force. For purposes of this analysis, an objective observer is aware that implicit, institutional, and unconscious biases, in addition to purposeful discrimination, have resulted in disproportionate police contacts, investigative seizures, and uses of force against Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) in Washington. Finally, in accordance with our precedent, if the person shows there was a seizure, then the burden shifts to the State to prove that the seizure was lawfully justified by a warrant or an applicable exception to the warrant requirement.

Based on the totality of the circumstances presented in this case, we hold that petitioner Palla Sum was seized when a sheriff’s deputy requested Sum’s identification while implying that Sum was under investigation for car theft. As the State properly concedes, at that time, the deputy did not have a warrant, reasonable suspicion, or any other lawful authority to seize Sum. As a result, Sum was unlawfully seized, and the false name and birth date he gave to the deputy must be suppressed. We therefore reverse the Court of Appeals and remand to the trial court for further proceedings.

Meredith

Finally, we consider whether the disturbance of Meredith’s private affairs in this case exceeded what was “reasonably necessary to further substantial governmental interests”. To make this determination, we consider “‘reasonableness…’ along with history, precedent, and common sense”. As a matter of both reasonableness and common sense, unless mass transit is offered for free, transit operators must be able to charge and collect fares from passengers. Therefore, as history and this court have long recognized, passengers using mass transit must pay their fares or they “may be ejected”. We do not question that premise.

However, in this case, Meredith was asked for proof of payment by law enforcement officers, who then identified and arrested him using resources that no civilian conducting fare enforcement could have accessed. Although we are not asked to opine on the constitutionality of these later actions, they could not have occurred without the initial seizure.

Moreover, as detailed above, the risk of such escalation would be acutely felt by reasonable transit passengers, who are more likely to be members of “historically marginalized groups”, including Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color. Members of such groups are already known to be “‘disproportionate victims’” of “police encounters without reasonable suspicion”. If allowed to continue, the high level of intrusion that occurred here would only exacerbate these disparities. The State has not shown such an outcome is reasonably necessary to further the governmental interest in fare enforcement on public transit.

To be fair, it appears that this ruling forbids only fare enforcement by police officers, not fare enforcement by transit employees who are backed up by police officers if they find a noncompliant passenger.

Yet, “[o]n this particular day [the officers] didn’t have any [transit employees] to work for [them,] so [the police officers] worked as a team of two deputies riding the bus fully outfitted in [their] patrol uniforms and then one deputy in a chase car in case [they] dealt with anybody.”

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