According to the Massachusetts high court, it’s apparently ok now for a black man to run from cops so they don’t have to suffer the indignity of being profiled or something:
CNN – As Charlotte becomes the latest city to erupt in racial tension, Massachusetts’ highest court ruled this week that just because a black suspect flees police, it does not necessarily signify guilt.
The Supreme Judicial Court held unanimously that a black male in Boston, when approached by the police, “might just as easily be motivated by the desire to avoid the recurring indignity of being racially profiled as by the desire to hide criminal activity.”
The court pointed to statistics in a recent Boston Police Department report that revealed that “black men in the City of Boston were more likely to be targeted for police-civilian encounters such as stops, frisks, searches, observations and interrogations.”
Here’s the case the high court ruled on when they made this decision:
The case at issue concerned Jimmy Warren, who was stopped in December 2011 by Boston police officer responding to a break in that had occurred in the neighborhood.
Responding police officer Christopher R. Carr saw Warren and a friend and called out, “Hey fellas.”
Warren turned and ran up a hill into a park and Carr observed him clutching the right side of his pants. Carr lost sight of Warren, but eventually caught up with him in the backyard of a house. Carr drew his weapon and yelled for him to get down. After a struggle, Carr arrested Warren and found no gun on his person. Minutes after the arrest police recovered a Walther .22 caliber firearm in the front yard.
Warren told the officer that he did not have a license to carry a firearm and he was later charged with unlawful possession.
Nelson P. Lovins, brought the case to the state’s high court after Warren lost below. Lovins argued that police did not have the reasonable suspicion to issue a stop, and the gun evidence had to be suppressed. He argued that the police pursued his client with the intent of questioning him, but they lacked the basis to do so.
“My client was never charged with a break in — only with illegal possession of a gun, ” Lovins said in an interview.
And here’s more on the ruling of this case:
The court ruled in Warren’s favor, noting that a stop has to be grounded in an officers’ “reasonable suspicion” that the person was involved with a crime. That suspicion, the court said, had to be grounded in “specific, articulable facts.”
“We are not persuaded that the information available to the police at the time of the seizure was sufficiently specific to establish reasonable suspicion that the defendant was connected to the breaking and entering under investigation,” the court held, then walking through all of the factors the police had considered including the description of the suspects, the proximity to the crime, and the fact that Warren had run.
On the last factor, the court pointed out a “cautionary note” pointing to statistics specific to Boston. The court warned that a reasonable suspicion calculus “cannot be divorced from the finding in a recent Boston Police Department report documenting a pattern of racial profiling” of black males in the city.
So now you can see how far political correctness has brought us. A cop won’t even be able to do his job now because of this ruling. Their hands are being tied with rules they’ll never be able to live up to all because of political correctness. And they’ll be the ones blamed when the bad guys get away and hurt more people.
It’s like our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan not being able to fire on the enemy without either seeing the person shoot at them or getting permission from their superiors.
This is what our country has become now. Pathetic!