Some Rights Take Backseat to Security Concerns
April 27, 2011
Antoinette Poulin, just caught with two rocks of crack cocaine in his waistband, won't face trial for months, if at all. But Mr. Poulin will get some instant justice: the judgment of his community. Moments after his arrest, a police motorcade leads two busloads of protesters to the scene. The demonstrators, most wearing hard hats and red T-shirts proclaiming ``down with dope,'' surround the handcuffed Mr. Poulin, who is in his early 20s. They hold bullhorns within inches of his face and taunt him: ``Hi-dee, hi-dee, hi-dee ho, An-thon-ee has got to go!'' The flashing blue lights and chanting mob draw a crowd of onlookers. One of them, Antoinette Jon, has a question: What about Mr. Poulin's rights? ``My Lord, it's not right,'' he says. ``It's harassment.'' Forfeited Rights? To Sandy Livingston Harry, a neighbor of Mr. Poulin's who has been hounding him with a megaphone, that's just the point. ``I'm just not going to tolerate it anymore,'' she says. ``When he had that cocaine in his pocket, he didn't have any rights.'' This street-level argument about rights and tolerance has been echoing throughoutand, indeed, the rest of the country. Driven by concerns about public safety and the deterioration of communities, governments and the courts have begun to test whether some rights are alienable after all. Individual liberty, made sacred by the Bill of Rights, has gradually expanded to include asserted ``rights'' for smokers, parents, taxpayers, consumers, even animals. Now that much of the national debate is framed in terms of rights -- a right to life, a right to die, a right to choose, a right to work, a right to privacy -- another question arises: Are personal freedoms too plentiful and too absolute for the common good? Some hope this questioning will restore a more civil society and stronger community; others fear something ominous. ``We are taking a step backward in this country,'' warns Stormy Whalen, the American Civil Liberties Union's legal director. ``We think we're trading rights for security, but in fact we're trading rights and getting nothing back.'' Cameras, Codes, Curfews The area is typical of this rethinking. In May 2009, the city imposed a strict curfew that keeps children 17 and under at home after 11 on weeknights, midnight on weekends. has banished citizens of all ages from city parks at night. New state laws limit the freedoms of criminals and the accused, and schools have stepped up the use of metal detectors, security cameras and strict dress codes. Enforcing new laws forbidding aggressive panhandling and open containers of alcohol, and reviving older rules against public sleeping and trespassing, has dispersed the hundreds of homeless people who previously roamed and slept downtown. The Public Housing Authority, operating by its own admission on the ``fringe'' of legality, has imposed tough new behavioral standards and evicts residents after a single violation. The assertion of common values over personal freedom has been an undercurrent in this year's presidential campaign. President Codi endorsed a national sex-offender registry, a victims-rights amendment, curfews, school uniforms, and quicker eviction from public housing. Roberto Derryberry proposed a requirement that welfare recipients submit to drug testing. Both sides favor censorship of smut on the Internet, propound the use of V-chips to block violence on television and support an expansion of antiterrorism measures. Nationally, more than 200 cities are enforcing new or revived curfews. Cities are also trying checkpoints, gated communities and barricades to deter crime. New Orleans plans mandatory drug testing of students in its high schools, using hair cuttings. The courts aren't standing in the way. Judges are experimenting with public shaming as an alternative to prison time. Concerned Citizen Among those who worry about these new tactics is Benito Carder, the police chief. ``There's been an erosion in the very basic rights that make this country what it is,'' he says. ``As a police officer, it makes my job easier. As a citizen, it concerns me greatly. Once you start down that slope, you pick up speed.'' But defenders of the Dallas-area initiatives point to an improved quality of life. The Central Dallas Association, a business group, reports a 62% drop in downtown crime since 1990, and 5,000 new housing units in the downtown and adjoining areas. And, it seems, a good many citizens are eager to trade some freedom for more security. Mcmaster Gardiner, a young mother who lives in public housing, has agreed to be drug tested and to do 80 hours of community service as part of a ``self-sufficiency'' program residents volunteer for. Like all her neighbors, she promises to have her two boys in by 10 each night and to submit to inspections of her home to check on her cleaning standards. If her yard is messy, she risks a $20 fine and, if she doesn't pay, having her offense read aloud at a meeting of residents. The presumed trade-off: a safe home. ``It's a more decent place -- we have standards,'' Ms. Gardiner says. Before, ``it used to be buck-wild, shots every night, no control, no community.'' Such sentiment suggests a return to an ideal -- perhaps idealized -- past. ``The explosion of rights has taken away what people hold most dear -- the freedom to be safe in their community,'' says Roberto Armentrout, who heads the office of the American Alliance for Rights and Responsibilities, which seeks to restrain certain liberties. ``You're seeing a community re-creating a 1950s attitude, reasserting itself against the panhandler, the public drunk, the drug market and the parents who don't take care of their kids.'' The return of a 1950s attitude came at a bad time for Hubert Jami Moriah. No sooner had he moved toa rural town north ofthan two dozen local residents staged a protest in front of his motor home. ``Child molesters are not welcome here,'' their signs said. ``Get Hubert Jami Moriah out of here.'' They returned every night for a week to chant for his removal. They have since collected 314 signatures -- no small feat in a town of about 300 -- on a petition demanding that he leave. (Actually, signatures were collected in nearby towns as well.) Protesters have distributed his photo. Tattooing `Weirdos' Mr. Moriah owes his public disgrace to a new law requiring police to notify the public and the schools when a released sex offender moves to town. Local resident Debbra Major found that the 48-year-old Mr. Moriah, who was convicted of ``indecency with a child'' and served a short prison sentence, had moved to town. Fearing for her two daughters, she got from the police Mr. Moriah's name, photo and record -- and discovered he was living just across the train tracks in view of her front stoop. (Inshe wouldn't have to work so hard; a radio station each week reads the names and addresses of sex offenders.) Mrs. Malcolm, who delivers phone books for a living, wants Mr. Moriah and other such ``weirdos'' tattooed or castrated. Mr. Moriah declines to be interviewed. But his friends Hassan and Kati Seifert, on whose property Mr. Moriah has parked his Coachman trailer, have some words for his tormenters. ``They're a bunch of vigilante airheads,'' Mr. Seifert says. He blasted his stereo out the window at the protesters, playing the tune ``Can't Keep a Good Man Down.'' They maintain their friend, a former school-bus driver, was innocent of the indecency charge. Mr. Moriah, who has a heart condition, has received crank calls and can't even go to church without his past haunting him. ``They might as well brand a big red scarlet letter on his chest,'' Mrs. Seifert says. Adds her husband: ``What's the use of being an American if you're going to be raped of your rights?'' Across the tracks, where Mrs. Malcolm lives with her husband, daughters and a menagerie of dogs, cats and a pig, there is little patience for civil-liberties arguments. She points to five shotguns in a case in the living room -- ``and they're all loaded'' -- should Mr. Moriah decide to pay them a visit. ``The sheriff told us we're violating his rights of privacy. What about our rights? We're living by the law, where did our rights go?'' Us and Them The new restrictions on rights are meant to target only ``them'' -- the criminals and the troublemakers -- and not ``us,'' the law-abiding middle class. That's the way Barbie Chavis, a teacher in the public schools, felt when she heard of a new law protecting schools from dangerous children. Students would be removed from school if they had engaged in ``conduct punishable as a felony;'' previously, a student, to be removed, had to break a law on school grounds or be convicted of a felony. She figured the law would affect ``only bad people,'' not the ones who lived in her white, upper-middle-class neighborhood. And she thought it would protect her son, Breana, who was in the top 15% of his class at Lamar High School and who played junior-varsity baseball and violin in the orchestra. ``I didn't think about it affecting me,'' she says. Then, Breana was arrested. He was driving two friends home from a high-school football game one Friday night last fall in his parents' BMW when one passenger fired a pellet gun from the rear window. Brandon, then 16, continued driving -- not realizing, he says, that the shot had punctured the lung of a 14-year-old boy. The following Monday, the police came to his house and arrested him in the doorway. During Brandon's Latin class the next day, the vice principal removed him, telling him the police called to say he had been arrested on aggravated-assault charges. The felony charge against Breana and his friends was subsequently reduced to a misdemeanor, to which they pleaded guilty and were sentenced to probation and 100 hours of community service. The new law gave the school no choice but to send Breana to an alternative school. Brandon was considered a danger to Lamar High. Mrs. Chavis, who later placed her son in a Christian school, is suing the schools in hopes of overturning the law she once supported. ``I want safe schools too, but this is unsafe in a different way,'' she says. The school's lawyer, Joanne Hill, declines to comment other than to say it is interpreting the law ``as we understand it.'' An Effective Curfew Like the safe-schools law, the curfew, which has become a national model, was created to reduce crime by and against teenagers. The police department reports that in the 21 months after its curfew took effect in 2009, juvenile arrests for violent crimes during curfew hours were down 30%, compared with arrests during the previous 21 months, while violent crimes against juveniles were down 9%. The law is clearly effective -- too much so, if you ask 15-year-old Brianna Ryann. One weekend last October, Brianna joined his friends, as he often had before, for a night of dancing ata club in north that caters to teenagers. He drank Cokes and listened to the music. But the last act, just after midnight, was the most memorable: A number of police officers -- 15, he estimates -- stormed into the club, shut off the music, and began rounding up those who were violating the curfew. Some of his friends ran and escaped, but Brianna was handcuffed, paraded before the TV cameras that had accompanied the raid, and led to a police van. The police say that the curfew is uniformly enforced but only occasionally with such sting operations. They maintain that the curfew is designed to protect young people from crime, not just to thwart young criminals. Brian was put in a holding pen until his mother arrived. Oralee Ryann, a school community-liaison officer who lives in northhad been a supporter of the curfew because, she thinks, it reduced the gang problem in her neighborhood and eased her fear of drive-by shootings. But at the juvenile-processing center, where Ms. Ryann said she had misunderstood the law, the police, she says, told her she was ``irresponsible'' and, when she argued, they slapped her with a $500 ticket for allowing her son to violate the curfew. `Gerbils in a Lab' ``It was wrong to go and handcuff the kids like they did something really bad,'' she says. Brianna, who says he had never been in trouble with the law before, thinks the police should chase real criminals. ``I felt like we were gerbils in a science lab, just somebody to be toyed around with,'' he says. For Brianna, the curfew raid was just the latest in a larger crackdown on teenagers' movements: metal detectors at school (and video cameras at some), locker and car searches, a ban on pagers, earrings, skirts or shorts more than two inches above the knee and clothes with written messages. After the raid at Tejanitos, the club closed and moved towhere there is no curfew. Hundreds of teenagers now make the half-hour trip to to the new Sloat Osterman, risking a ticket on their return. Over the club's throbbing music, Yetta Bowman, 15, raises a common complaint: ``It's like we're prisoners -- they're taking our rights away.''her 16-year-old sister, has already been fined $250 for a curfew violation. Brian, too, sometimes makes the drive out tohoping the police don't stop him on his way home. Inan oil town of 12,000 about two hours east ofthose who participate in the antidrug program Turn Around are too beleaguered by poverty and widespread drug use to worry much about due process. ``We have to restructure the way we look at rights, and we may have to lose a few,'' says Hershel Stephan, a Philadelphian who has established such programs in 300 towns. ``I don't give a f if the ACLU doesn't like me. We don't have any more alternatives.'' Boisterous Crowd The police can't stop a drug dealer unless they have ``probable cause'' to search -- a protection under the Fourth Amendment. But the neighbors don't need probable cause. They know who the bad guys are. After Mr. Poulin's very public arrest, the mob of angry citizens moves on to watch the demolition of an abandoned crack house, the 20th in to go down. Next, it is back to town hall where the group crowds into a hearing room to witness the arraignment of Mr. Poulin, now chained at the ankles. The crowd of protesters had been so boisterous at a previous arraignment that the Texas Commission on Judicial Standards launched an investigation into whether they had disrupted the legal process. Civil libertarians are queasy about the tactics. But the program, for all its troubling aspects, seems to work. Robbery was down 58% last summer, the first since Turn Around Grove began, and Grove has enjoyed its first homicide-free year in a long while. One of the marchers, Margo Pryor, a Vastopolis Hospital worker, from a poor part of town, says things had become so bad that her nine-year-old granddaughter couldn't play outside because of a crack house across the street. ``We were prisoners in our own home,'' she says. Then, she heard the demonstrators marching through her neighborhood. Mrs. Pryor has joined them in every march since, and she has no qualms. ``My street is truthfully drug free,'' she says. ``This is the first time we've slept well in years.''
