Our world is
filled with villains and it’s very tempting to believe that we should go to
whatever lengths are necessary to stop them from doing harm. We have invented increasingly effective ways
to combat crime and terrorism, yet along with our advances come the inevitable
and unintended consequences. When asked whether you could accept new tools to
combat crime even if they severely erode our 4th amendment rights to
privacy it may be easy to think that indeed you could. Your opinion may change
when it is you that has to cope with unfair and ill-considered practices that
ruin your quality of life and impede the freedoms you believed as a United
States citizen you were entitled to. We
cannot allow unethical means of combatting crime and terrorism to exist because
then we all risk becoming the criminals we loathe.
Part of what
makes our country amazing is the fact that we have the basic rights that every
person is entitled to and that even those accused of crimes are ,”innocent
until proven guilty.” In “Minority
Report” the technology called precrime actually convicted criminals before they
could commit the act that would make them a criminal. The main character John Anderton is accused
of a crime before he even knows of the events that will lead him to the cross
roads of making the decision. He is then
pursued for a crime that he has no idea why he will commit and that he indeed
has no intention of committing. How can
we without second thought convict someone of a crime they have not even yet
committed? This shares an eerie similarity
to the stop and frisk procedure used in New York City that has forced thousands
of innocent New Yorkers to undergo humiliating searches of their personal
effects in front of their peers for no other reason than looking “suspicious”.
Being stopped is extremely uncomfortable and scary as a result of the
undue force that many police officers tend to use. Over eighty five percent of
those stopped are Latino and African-American (New York Times – Stop &
Frisk Policy). These individuals can be
compared to John Anderton because none of them have committed any crime other
than being “suspicious” and yet they are treated as badly as a common
thug. We also have innocent men and
woman that are increasingly having their DNA entered into a massive database
before they have even been convicted of a crime. (F.B.I. and States Vastly Expand
DNA Databases Soloman Moore) I believe this
is an ugly smear upon our legal system and it’s a shame that they are getting
away with it. Not only is this happening often but it is very difficult to have
your DNA taken out of this database even after being proven innocent of whatever
crime you were accused of or even in the circumstance that your DNA was taken
in error. We cannot allow accused
persons to be treated as felons before they have even been convicted of a
crime, by doing so we turn innocent people into victims of a flawed system.
Law enforcement
promises us that these are the best ways to combat crimes. They argue that
without slightly imposing on our rights that we would live in a much more
violent and dangerous world. When asked
of stop and frisk and why there are a disproportionate number of minorities
stopped they will counter that the neighborhoods with highest crime rates also
happen to have a high minority population and that it is inevitable that
minorities are going to be stopped more often.
They will cite Philadelphia’s recent surge in crime (New York Times
–Stop and Frisk) to try to paint a picture of what could happen if we limit the
stop and frisk practice. As someone who
has undergone a very humiliating stop and frisk, I can attest that no person
deserves to go through what I went through in the name of “crime
prevention”. Just a few years ago, as I
ran to my local convenience store in a fervent pursuit of my nicotine fix,
three unmarked police cars screeched to a halt at my side. A police officer
grabbed my collar and shoved me onto his car and roughly patted me down. When I asked with my signature sarcastic
flare, “What illegal drugs did you find today officer?” The officer smacked my rear roughly and
laughed calling me a homo while he was at it and telling that he found a “sweet
ass”. I was furious and humiliated and I
could not believe that someone who was supposed to protect me was actually
humiliating me and that the officers watching allowed him to do so. I asked for his badge number and he laughed
in my face, got into his vehicle and drove off.
No one deserves to be subjected to that type of reprehensible behavior
but unfortunately mine is not a unique story.
Thousands of people across America are treated as second class citizens
and even mocked all because they fit the description of a suspicious person.
I reiterate that
what makes our country great is the fact that we all have inalienable rights
and we are all innocent until proven guilty.
By using unethical means of law enforcement and convicting people based
on what they may do and no what they have done, takes away one of the qualities
that make us an amazing country. It also
gives people in power the license to mistreat and abuses a system that is
supposed to protect us not humiliate us and make us fear those that are here to
protect us. For a justice system to work
it must be ethical or we risk turning innocent men and woman accused of crime
into yet another victim but instead of a victim of crime they become victims of
a flawed system.
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