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Why do people think police have more privacy?

A couple of news stories last week make me wonder why governing officials of late seem to think that citizens don't have much privacy, but that whatever privacy rights you or I may have, police officers have more. At first thought, you'd think police officers have less privacy than private citizens. They're employees of a governmental body and therefore responsible to people we elect. They act "under color of authority," meaning their power comes from the authority of the government and therefore must respect all civil and constitutional rights. Their actions are more subject to scrutiny in criminal and civil court than perhaps any other job, excepting "career criminal." Any official police action should be transparent. Every time the police act but refuse to explain why or how, there's a serious question that someone's rights may have been violated. That's why there are procedures and rules and Miranda rights and case law and all those other things -- when police actions are examined, they have to be flawless, or at least any mistakes must be so small as to be considered "harmless" by a court. That means that if the mistake hadn't been made, the outcome would have been the same. "Harmless error" is a fertile ground in appellate courts, though such courts aren't generally inclined to find judicial or police errors. Police officers have accepted a dangerous and public job, and when they do it right, they're correctly regarded as heroes. They can't do the job and hide. And yet, two stories last week are about governmental bodies trying to give police officers more privacy than regular citizens. If someone puts your name and address on the Web, it may be disturbing but not illegal. If someone posts the names and addresses of all of Enron's top executives, that's pretty clearly a First Amendment right. But in the state of Washington, publishing the names and addresses of police officers -- information that is a matter of public record -- will be illegal starting June 20, 2002. Bill Sheehan publishes a Web site, JusticeFiles.org, that publishes the names and addresses of police officers in his town (Kirkland, WA). The city of Kirkland not only sued Sheehan for publishing information that's in public records, it threatened to sue Declan McCullagh (of Politech) for publishing a portion of the site in a news article. Politech has a summary of coverage. That summary includes the latest: in response to Sheehan's site, the Washington Legislature passed a law that makes it illegal to publish the names and addresses of police or correctional officers or court employees, or even the names and addresses of similar people, if that publication identifies them as police, correctional, or court officers, and if the people identified did not provide written permission. Of course, it's not illegal to post your name and address on the Web alongside whatever your job is, but Washington, in a misguided attempt to protect its police officers from imagined criminals, thinks that police officers have more privacy than you do. If anything, they have less. Interestingly, the US Supreme Court will examine whether publishing registries of sex offenders on the Internet is double-punishment, but the government argues it is not -- just public information compiled for convenience. States downplay any instance of vigilantism for sex offenders, but Washington thinks it's a primary concern for police officers? Sheehan is suing in Federal Court to have the Washington law overturned before it takes effect, and he probably has a good shot at it. Police officers may be understandably uncomfortable at being identified on the Internet, but the real question is why you can be identified if they cannot. Such creates special rights for police officers, something I'm fairly sure most people wouldn't support. It was a similar thing in New Jersey. A few years ago, ABCNews paid three black men to drive through a poor neighborhood in New Jersey for several days in an expensive car -- breaking no laws, just cruising around -- to see if police would pull them over for no reason other than being black and driving an expensive car. Eventually (though not instantly), three police officers did exactly that. ABCNews had equipped the car with hidden cameras that captured the stop on tape. ABCNews aired the video, including the officers searching the car and the men with absolutely no probable cause other than that, allegedly, those people shouldn't have been there at that time. The officers sued, saying that the report, "Driving While Black," portrayed them as racist. A court disagreed, and last week, a state appeals court said the lower court was correct. First, the stop and search were illegal, so any depiction of them can't be defamatory -- the officers screwed up, and they were upset that the public learned about it. This is pretty offensive in and of itself -- the idea that it's perfectly legal for police officers to offer you a chance to break the law and that, if you do, it's not "entrapment" as long as they didn't encourage you, but offering them a chance to break the law somehow excuses their actions. If it's not entrapment for you, it's not entrapment for them. But they had a second claim as well -- that, as police officers, they had a right to privacy in executing a search, illegal or not, and that airing the video violated that right. The appellate court said no, but not for the right reason. The court said that since the search took place on a public road with all four car doors ajar, the officers had no expectation of privacy. The correct answer would have been that officers acting under color of authority never have an expectation of privacy, because they're acting on behalf of the public. The officers' attorney says he'll urge an appeal to the New Jersey Supreme Court because the ruling is "harmful to the people of New Jersey." It's more harmful to the reputation of the police in New Jersey, and some people don't see that as any different. I do. The problem with all this is that it takes the difficult job of being a police officer and makes it more difficult. Hey, they signed up for it. The underlying problem is that this country values police officers highly but not enough to compensate them for what they do for society. Personally, I believe that police officers should be far more rigorously screened and monitored, and compensated accordingly. People with any record of violence or abuse should be disqualified from the job. If you fail the police entrance exam twice, you shouldn't be allowed to take it again in any jurisdiction for ten years. If there is any allegation of misconduct, the standard for evaluation should not be a committee of police officers predisposed to find in favor of the "thin blue line," but the equivalent of a criminal preliminary hearing. If a judge or a jury of six citizens finds a preponderance of evidence that an officer committed misconduct, that officer should be dismissed and disqualified from further service. Harsh? Sure, but I also think entry-level salaries for police officers should be $75,000 per year, or maybe $100K in big cities with higher costs of living, with about $10K raises per year of discipline-free service. I think the American people would gladly pay for a police force that was above reproach in every case, one that was hard to join and hard to remain in. It is a horribly difficult job, and to preserve everyone's rights it needs to be even more difficult. There's a risk such wealth could make police officers too conservative, but I doubt it -- keeping them poor hasn't made them too liberal. If they don't do a good job, dismiss them with our thanks. If they do a good job, reward them like the most difficult job in society deserves. Attempts to reward police by making them a class "above" citizens, though, with special privacy rights you and I don't have, are misguided at best. Just pay the heroes what they're worth.

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