Arrest-Proof Yourself by Dale C. Carson, Wes Denham
Authors: Dale C. Carson, Wes Denham
Tags: General, Self-Help, Political Science, Law, Law Enforcement, Political Freedom & Security, arrest, Practical Guides, Detention of persons
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“Officer, that man threatened me. He beat me and said he was going to shoot me! Help! ”
You’re innocent. You don’t like this person, and may have had some sharp words with him or her, but you never touched the person and never made a threat of bodily harm. Nonetheless, you can get arrested, fingerprinted, and dumped into the electronic plantation for life while the cops investigate what’s going on. Police are aware that people will lie and make false accusations in order to get their enemies arrested, but cops often err on the side of caution and arrest the person named anyway.
This actually happened to my coauthor. A guy who hates him wrote an anonymous letter to the sheriff’s office accusing him of various nefarious deeds. The cops were all over him for two entire weeks . Fortunately, as his attorney, I did the talking to the cops, so he was able to avoid interrogation and arrest. As for the poison dwarf who wrote the “anonymous” letter, we sued him.
There’s another demon at work here—bureaucratic convenience. Government agencies hate to hire clerks and dedicate office space to fulfilling document requests. They really hate records requests from the media, which can give any agency and administrator instant media burn for screwups. And they really, really hate records requests accompanied by Freedom of Information Act and Sunshine Law litigation (with attendant media scorching of all and sundry).
The bureaucratic solution? The light bulb that goes off in every administrator’s head? Dump the whole thing onto the Web! That’s right, put those expensive computer geeks to work. Digitize everything in every file folder. Then dump the whole shebang, now neatly organized into relational databases, into the black hole that is the Internet. This allows schools, colleges, cops, and private and public sector employers to check up on you 24/7 with a click of the computer mouse. It also allows government employees to do what they do best—get the heck out of the office by 4:59 P.M. as God intended.
But let us not unduly excoriate our bureaucratic friends. They get no direction from elected officials who, even if they are aware of the problem, couldn’t care less. People who have been arrested but not prosecuted or convicted are not a constituency anyone cares about.
CAN I HAVE YOUR SOCIAL?
Who has not heard a chirpy feminine voice on the phone or over the counter asking for your social security number? Hospital patients might as well have the number tattooed on their heads, since they get asked for it a dozen times a day. Pending perfection of universally accessible fingerprint and DNA identification systems, the social security number has become the de facto universal ID. With this magic number anyone can access an astonishing amount of information about you. The use of this number has created a multi-billion-dollar criminal enterprise called identity theft.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Look at the illustration of my coauthor’s social security card (the number has been omitted to keep him out of any more trouble than he’s already in). Can you read that last line, printed in uppercase by the government of the United States of America? It says, “NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION.” This card was issued in the 1960s. Ah, those were innocent years!
WHAT ABOUT MY RIGHT TO PRIVACY?
The short answer is you don’t have a right to privacy. You have some federal court opinions that assert that the nation’s founders kinda, sorta intended that you should have a right of privacy. Alas, these worthy 18th-century gentlemen forgot to actually write anything on the subject in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Congress and state legislatures are all in favor of rights of privacy, but somehow they keep forgetting to pass bills into law.
Even if privacy laws restricting arrest records get passed, they mean nothing unless enforced. Heck, the right to vote regardless of race, creed, or color is quite
You’re innocent. You don’t like this person, and may have had some sharp words with him or her, but you never touched the person and never made a threat of bodily harm. Nonetheless, you can get arrested, fingerprinted, and dumped into the electronic plantation for life while the cops investigate what’s going on. Police are aware that people will lie and make false accusations in order to get their enemies arrested, but cops often err on the side of caution and arrest the person named anyway.
This actually happened to my coauthor. A guy who hates him wrote an anonymous letter to the sheriff’s office accusing him of various nefarious deeds. The cops were all over him for two entire weeks . Fortunately, as his attorney, I did the talking to the cops, so he was able to avoid interrogation and arrest. As for the poison dwarf who wrote the “anonymous” letter, we sued him.
There’s another demon at work here—bureaucratic convenience. Government agencies hate to hire clerks and dedicate office space to fulfilling document requests. They really hate records requests from the media, which can give any agency and administrator instant media burn for screwups. And they really, really hate records requests accompanied by Freedom of Information Act and Sunshine Law litigation (with attendant media scorching of all and sundry).
The bureaucratic solution? The light bulb that goes off in every administrator’s head? Dump the whole thing onto the Web! That’s right, put those expensive computer geeks to work. Digitize everything in every file folder. Then dump the whole shebang, now neatly organized into relational databases, into the black hole that is the Internet. This allows schools, colleges, cops, and private and public sector employers to check up on you 24/7 with a click of the computer mouse. It also allows government employees to do what they do best—get the heck out of the office by 4:59 P.M. as God intended.
But let us not unduly excoriate our bureaucratic friends. They get no direction from elected officials who, even if they are aware of the problem, couldn’t care less. People who have been arrested but not prosecuted or convicted are not a constituency anyone cares about.
CAN I HAVE YOUR SOCIAL?
Who has not heard a chirpy feminine voice on the phone or over the counter asking for your social security number? Hospital patients might as well have the number tattooed on their heads, since they get asked for it a dozen times a day. Pending perfection of universally accessible fingerprint and DNA identification systems, the social security number has become the de facto universal ID. With this magic number anyone can access an astonishing amount of information about you. The use of this number has created a multi-billion-dollar criminal enterprise called identity theft.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Look at the illustration of my coauthor’s social security card (the number has been omitted to keep him out of any more trouble than he’s already in). Can you read that last line, printed in uppercase by the government of the United States of America? It says, “NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION.” This card was issued in the 1960s. Ah, those were innocent years!
WHAT ABOUT MY RIGHT TO PRIVACY?
The short answer is you don’t have a right to privacy. You have some federal court opinions that assert that the nation’s founders kinda, sorta intended that you should have a right of privacy. Alas, these worthy 18th-century gentlemen forgot to actually write anything on the subject in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Congress and state legislatures are all in favor of rights of privacy, but somehow they keep forgetting to pass bills into law.
Even if privacy laws restricting arrest records get passed, they mean nothing unless enforced. Heck, the right to vote regardless of race, creed, or color is quite
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