Be suspicious of “resonable suspicion”

If a cop stopped you, demanded to know your name and deemed that name suspicious, you might… If a cop stopped you, demanded to know your name and deemed that name suspicious, you might get arrested. So if your name is Joseph McCarthy, Johnny Ashcroft or Neil Young and you are not a dead senator, the attorney general or a bluesy singer/bandleader, respectively, you might be in trouble.

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Monday that police could demand people’s identification on “reasonable suspicion,” rather than “probable cause,” the usual arrest standard, according to an article in yesterday’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. What “reasonable suspicion” means — it seems to be a gut reaction, rather than a tangible standard — has yet to be defined. And, in some places, reasonable suspicion could mean a black man in a Benz or an immigrant with an accent.

What’s more, there is no national standard for IDs for people to prove their identities. People less likely to carry ID, like non-drivers or those more likely to be suspicious of the police because they’re already victims of racial profiling, may be unfairly targeted.

The case began in Nevada, when a man who was eventually convicted of “delaying an officer” — nothing else — refused to identify himself to officers when asked repeatedly. It challenged Nevada’s “stop and identify” law, a law that several states, though not Pennsylvania, have. So, if asked, people must identify themselves, or else face arrest.

This ruling is unwarranted search and seizure — literally. It doesn’t take a Constitutional scholar to figure out that asking people questions without any concrete reason is an unreasonable search and seizure … or wait, it does, and the Court didn’t. Plus, even something as minor as an ID can cause a hassle, and the Court was wrong to uphold the “stop and identify” law.

Several groups, the American Civil Liberties Union among them, make the slippery slope argument — that this ruling will evolve into police-state tactics. But asking someone’s name and searching his or her car are wholly different things, and the ruling does not put the freedom from the latter in jeopardy.

Still, being able to walk down the street or cruise around town unmolested by police is crucial to a free and open society, and this ruling jeopardizes that right.

So Misters McCarthy, Ashcroft and Young might be in trouble for having reasonably suspicious names if they’re stopped. Hopefully, this unfair law will not be unfairly applied.