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The Pros And Cons Of Unwarranted Search

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The Fourth Amendment forbids unreasonable searches and seizures from police officers, unless a search warrant has been allowed by the Court. However, the Supreme Court ruled that unwarranted searches will be acceptable if: the officer reasonably feels the search is necessary for his/her own safety, if probable cause leads the officer to believe a crime has been committed, if the person consents to the search, or if the person has been arrested, and the search is related to the crime. These reasons are arguably fair, as a police officer should be able to act on intuition if he/she feels as though his/her life is in danger or the lives of other. However, this opens up the possibility for racial bias affecting the judgment of police officers, …show more content…

For some people, maybe having multiple jobs is not enough, so they resort to selling drugs. Since they live in a high rate area, cops are more alert, and maybe even more aggressive in finding anyone committing a crime. Unwarranted stop and searches opens up the possibility of racist cops (both implicit and explicit) going into low income areas highly populated by colored people, and just search anyone that looks suspicious enough, and eventually, catch some with drugs, weapons, etc. In a book by Michelle Alexander, titled: “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, she analyzes the many methods police us to conduct an unwarranted stop and frisk. The quote reads: “A pretext stop is a traffic stop motivated not by any desire to enforce traffic laws, but instead by a desire to hunt for drugs in the absence of any evidence of illegal drug activity” (Alexander, pg 66). In Alexander’s words, police officers can pull over anyone they want, and using the pretext of a common traffic stop, they use the opportunity to try to fish out any drugs, which is part of the reason why mass incarceration is such an issue in America, if you stop and frisk enough people, of course you will eventually find someone who is breaking the

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