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Stealing this from @ToaKraka in the FF thread:
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?
If you don't suppress such evidence, police will not bother following the proper trail of investigation; they will simply do what is expedient. This is great if you want more incidents closed by arrest (and more criminals caught if the cops are at least honest, though 'expedient' can go beyond that point), but lousy if you want to get around without being hassled by police if you have any resemblance to common criminal types (age, sex, color, clothing, etc)
Wouldn't people trying to differentiate themselves from the criminal types instead of imitating them be a good thing?
No, I do not want sumptuary laws enacted through some back door
Some of those things are unavoidable, such as age.
Is it really back door sumptuary laws to say “maybe dont wear gang colors in a gang area”? I don’t think that’s reasonable, as really wearing gang colors and flashing gang signs in the wrong area is a good way to get pegged by a rival gang. This isn’t hard stuff either. Dont carry a colored hanky in your pocket, don’t wear a doo rag, and dont do weird signs with your hands.
That doesn’t seem like a high bar. You can still dress pretty badly
Yes.
I mean I just don’t see it. The bar is pretty low, and most people would pass it just by chance. Things like the colored hanky are pretty rare in most places. Doo rags are maybe a bit more common, but really they come off pretty easily. And as I mentioned above, it’s already dangerous for people to walk the streets dressed like a gang member because rival gangs will shoot people who look like members of other gangs.
What I am suggesting is that it shouldn’t be considered authoritarian for a cop to recognize obvious signs of gang membership and act appropriately— which at minimum would be investigating why that person is in the area and whether or not they are armed or match the description of a suspect. I get that you need to have some caution about letting a cop detain or seize someone, but if the only way to solve a crime is for the cops to catch them in the act, there’s no reason to have the police investigating crimes.
When a cop comes over to me because of what I'm wearing and demands to know why I'm in some area open to the general public, it IS authoritarian. Neither the police nor the local gangs rightfully get to decide how I dress. Obviously the local gangs don't care about "rightfully", but the police are supposed to.
I suppose we’re going to disagree here, but I really tend to land on the point that the purpose of having a criminal response unit is to respond to and investigate crimes with a purpose of bringing the guilty to Justice and to keep the community safe by doing so.
When you make rules that suggest the police and law enforcement are not allowed to notice and act upon very obvious signs of criminality (in this case clothing highly correlated to gang membership and thus criminality), in the interest of doing the things we have police for. If there’s a gang connected shooting, I want the cops to talk to anyone in the area who looks like a gang member. I want the cops to notice an increase of gang fashions in my neighborhood, because there are zero good things that come from that, and probably a whole lot of bad things.
I’ll agree to reasonable policing where cops don’t have a blank check to do anything at any time, but it has to be reasonable in the other direction. You have to have rules loose enough that the cops can notice and deal with obvious signs of potential criminality. Or to notice that someone looks suspicious and deal with it.
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