Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race

by Frank R. Baumgartner

Until the Fourth Amendment … is rewritten, the person and the effects of the individual are beyond the reach of all government agencies until there are reasonable grounds to believe (probable cause) that a criminal venture has been launched or is about to be launched. There have been powerful hydraulic pressures throughout our history that bear heavily on the Court to water down constitutional guarantees and give the police the upper hand. That hydraulic pressure has probably never been greater than it is today. Yet if the individual is no longer to be sovereign, if the police can pick him up whenever they do not like the cut of his jib, if they can “seize” and “search” him in their discretion, we enter a new regime. (Justice Douglas, dissenting, Terry v. Ohio, p. 39)