Here's "Rape Culture" For You: Cops Cavity-Searching Women On The Roadside
From time to time -- increasingly, in fact -- read about body cavity searches of women: typically young women and women who don't seem like they'll have the resources or will to make a big stink.
Often these happen on the roadside; sometimes, they involve medical facilities (and doctors who should lose their jobs and maybe more for complying and violating women and sometimes men for no medical reason).
Eric Boehm writes at Reason about one of these cases -- in which Texas cops spent 11 minutes physically violating a woman:
Charnesia Corley was a 21-year-old college student with no criminal record when two cops from the Harris County Sheriff's Office stopped her in June 2015 for running a red light.After searching her car, police claimed to have found .02 ounces of marijuana. That was enough, they apparently felt, to justify a full-body cavity search. When Corley refused to remove her clothes in the dimly lit parking lot where she was being detained, one of the officers threw her to the ground, pushed her partially underneath her own car, and yanked Corley's pants down to her ankles. For the next 11 minutes, dash cam video of the incident shows, she was held down by two officers while being searched. Corley claims that fingers repeatedly probed her vagina and that the officers ignored her protests. A third officer stood nearby holding a flashlight. No drugs were found on Corley's person.
Sam Cammack, an attorney representing Corley in a multi-million-dollar civil rights lawsuit against the county, calls the search "rape by cop."
"It is undoubted that they sexually assaulted her," Cammack says. "They put their fingers inside her vagina. You can't pull someone over, think you might find something, and do that to them."
Charges against the officers have been dropped, reports Pooja Lodhia at ABC13:
"It was unbelievable. They completely stripped her naked, from the waist down, spread her legs apart, threw her down in handcuffs, and had her face down in the concrete with her legs spread apart for, I mean, it had to be ten, eleven minutes," said Corley's attorney, Sam Cammack.Harris County deputies say they found .02 ounces of marijuana on Corley. But the district attorney dropped charges of marijuana possession and resisting arrest, saying that the search was "offensive and shocking."
Of course it's drug war-caused.
And let's be clear on this: They held her down and put their fingers inside her.
They sexually violated her. And for what?
Was she carrying bomb-making material to blow up a school? Or a little dried plant matter?
Just as we got rid of prohibition, we need to get rid of the disgusting laws in which the government tries to cage citizens for the possession of plant matter and other drugs. If somebody's driving drunk or stoned, okay, take them back to the police station, test them, and prosecute them.
But remember, the Ninth Amendment says that rights not explicitly accorded us are not to be denied.
Tenth Amendment Center's Anthony Gregory explains:
The Ninth Amendment says "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."This means that just because a personal right is not specifically mentioned does not mean the federal government can infringe upon it. Certainly the rights to use and sell drugs are being attacked in this very way.
And in moral terms, this is what the drug war means. It is the denial of self-ownership. Someone who can't decide what to put in himself does not own himself. The logic of the drug war is that the government owns you.
We look at all the rights trampled in the name of the drug war and we see how all rights are connected. People are denied the right to self-medicate and take the treatment they desire. Not just in regard to illegal drugs either, but those that are regulated.
Gregory also quotes "from Ludwig von Mises's economic masterpiece, Human Action, written sixty years ago in 1949":
However, the case is not so simple as that. Opium and morphine are certainly dangerous, habit-forming drugs. But once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments. A good case could be made out in favor of the prohibition of alcohol and nicotine. And why limit the government's benevolent providence to the protection of the individual's body only? Is not the harm a man can inflict on his mind and soul even more disastrous than any bodily evils? Why not prevent him from reading bad books and seeing bad plays, from looking at bad paintings and statues and from hearing bad music? The mischief done by bad ideologies, surely, is much more pernicious, both for the individual and for the whole society, than that done by narcotic drugs.These fears are not merely imaginary specters terrifying secluded doctrinaires. It is a fact that no paternal government, whether ancient or modern, ever shrank from regimenting its subjects' minds, beliefs, and opinions. If one abolishes man's freedom to determine his own consumption, one takes all freedoms away. The naive advocates of government interference with consumption delude themselves when they neglect what they disdainfully call the philosophical aspect of the problem. They unwittingly support the case of censorship, inquisition, religious intolerance, and the persecution of dissenters.
Well now, if nothing wrong was done I'm sure the sheriff and those two deputies wouldn't mind were a group of civic minded folk to do the same to their wives and daughters
lujlp at August 17, 2017 12:00 AM
I can't read about this one beyond the first paragraph, or the pictures. The savagery is off the scale
Crid at August 17, 2017 4:09 AM
The logic is that the government owns you.
Fixed it for ya. That's the notion of the all-powerful central state - the amount of resources the state will spend on you is proportionate to your value to the state.
Also, don't ever consent to a search. If they ask, they don't have probable cause because they'd be searching. You saying no isn't probable cause, either. Make 'em get a damn warrant. Go ahead, wake a judge up in the middle of the night, I'll wait.
And another argument against automatically conferring qualified immunity to these turkeys.
I R A Darth Aggie at August 17, 2017 6:11 AM
Normally I'm inclined to give the police the benefit of the doubt in cases like this, but it's difficult in this one.
No one in this case is arguing that the police did not conduct a strip search by the side of the road. As if it's normal to strip someone and search them in full view of the public.
At what point did Harris County give its officers the authority to put someone in a public state of undress that would get them arrested if they had put themselves into that same state? Who authorized this? Who thought it was a good idea to have officers conduct strip searches by the side of the road?
An argument has been advanced that her pants "fell down" because they were baggy. Okay, so pull them back up for her. Don't throw her down and "search" her half-naked on the side of the road.
An officer later told her, "You escalated it. I gave you several outs." So, someone mouthed off to you and in a fit of pique you used your authority to publicly humiliate them?
We may, as a society, need to reexamine why we have police and what we want out of having a police force.
British police are not armed, the foundational belief underlying that is the police should not be an occupying force but instead be a part of the communities they serve.
The British have always been touchy about the King's soldiers occupying their cities; our forefathers inherited that distrust of a standing army. See the Third Amendment to our Constitution.
Side note: that distrust is why the British Army does not have a royal warrant like the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force do.
London's Metropolitan Police remains unarmed because it was founded on the principle of "policing by consent," the notion that the police force owes its primary duty to the public, rather than to the state, as in other countries. The Met was founded in 1829, an era when there was a great deal of fear that an armed police force could be easily used as a domestic military force.
Even today, when the British public is evenly split on arming the police, the British police officers themselves are overwhelmingly in favor of remaining unarmed (86% in the last survey).
It's a notion that, although impractical in the US, is made more attractive by incidents like this.
Conan the Grammarian at August 17, 2017 6:20 AM
The War on Drugs is just one of any number of "causes" these days that its proponents regard as so important, so existential a crisis, that it must override the Bill of Rights. A lot of those same people would be horrified if you suggested to them that we should live in a police state, and yet a police state is exactly what they are proposing, and they fail to see the hypocrisy. These are the wages of half a century of the leftist culture war. What's important to me is what's important; what's important to you doesn't matter. Might makes right, and anything you do is moral as long as you support whatever the politically correct cause is at the moment.
The trust that America's government institutions have enjoyed since WWII is gone. The public attitude towards police is shifting from being regarded as the guardians of social order, to more like how they were regarded during Prohibition -- incompetent, corrupt and a barrier to be worked around. That's unfair to a lot of individual policemen and women, but it accurately describes many of the departments they work for. The law gives them incentive to write as many tickets, make as many arrests, and seize as much property as possible -- essentially, to act as pirates. At the same time, the unwritten rules grant various privileged status to different groups and place some VIPs off limits. Even diligent police will have a hard time resisting all these incentives and pressures.
The problem is worst in America's old cities where one-party rule has held sway for half a century or more, and government corruption is a way of life. But the rot is spreading.
Cousin Dave at August 17, 2017 7:11 AM
This stems from the idea that government is or can be a positive force. America was founded on the idea that government is, at best, a necessary evil and an impartial arbiter who can keep others for infringing on our rights and liberties. In the 19 century the idea arose that government is a good and can intervene in our lives to provide benefits to the people at large. Once this was allowed the scope of its interventions grew and the 'good' became whatever those in power saw fit to define it as.
America is not doomed, America is already dead.
Warhawke223 at August 17, 2017 8:18 AM
From the story at Reason:
"As if more clarity is needed on the issue, the Texas state legislature in 2015 passed a law specifying that "a peace officer may not conduct a body cavity search of a person during a traffic stop unless the officer first obtains a search warrant pursuant to this chapter authorizing the body cavity search." The bill—passed in response to public outcry over several high-profile incidents of roadside body cavity searches, including one in Harris County where a woman claimed that male troopers laughed while a female officer conducted a body cavity search on her—was signed into law just weeks before the Harris County officers strip-searched Corley."
So tell me again how these cops weren't breaking the law and should not be held accountable for their actions?
sara at August 17, 2017 9:02 AM
True story: A few months ago, I was discovered to have low testosterone levels (Low T). Considering I've always had ridiculously girlish arms and man-boobs since adolescence, I have probably always had a lower-than-normal T level. So now, I am finally remedying it, and my T level is now in normal range.
Anyway, my T prescription ran out a month ago, so I tried to get it renewed, since I need to give myself a T shot every 2 weeks. To make a long story short, since T is a controlled substance, the Drug Warriors decreed that I needed to renew my prescription with an actual paper document from my endocrinologist. It couldn't be renewed by phone or fax. So I ended up delaying my latest injection by a week, thanks to meddlesome Federal oinkers.
Now, I know that a delayed T injection isn't as bad as Amy lacking Adderall thanks to arbitrary quotas on active ingredients or a cancer patient not having enough pain medication or pot through some oppressive law, but it is yet another example of how the meddlesome Federal oinkers screw with our lives.
As for these rapists in blue, I would have given them 20 years apiece.
mpetrie98 at August 17, 2017 10:34 AM
Mistrust the police? the deuce!
http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/stateroundup/the-fhp-trooper-behind-quota-on-speeding-tickets-will-resign-sept-5/2334092
So tell me again how these cops weren't breaking the law and should not be held accountable for their actions?
The notion of "qualified immunity". Besides, the prosecutors benefit from that, and they have to work with the constabulary in the prosecution of crimes. A little quid, a little pro, and a little quo go a long way...
An example - and remember this if Kamala Harris tries to run for President:
http://observer.com/2015/03/california-prosecutor-falsifies-transcript-of-confession/
I R A Darth Aggie at August 17, 2017 11:48 AM
IRA...it was more of a rhetorical question. But I do not believe that qualified immunity is at play here. Texas passed a law specifically forbidding this conduct, I.e. roadside strip searches. So no quid, no pro and definitely no quo.
Something smells quite fishy...
sara at August 17, 2017 2:56 PM
Leave a comment