In a country of just over 300 million people, a rough analysis suggests state and local police conduct more than 8 million searches annually of pedestrians and automobiles alone. That sizable number doesn’t include searches of homes or workplaces, or searches by the federal government.11

  The number also doesn’t include a vast amount of police activity people commonly would call a “search” or “seizure,” but that doesn’t get labeled that way by the courts. For example, it is a typical practice in some states—like Florida—for officers to board interstate buses to perform drug interdiction. Basically it goes like this: With the passengers seated and ready to depart, sheriff’s department officials show up at the door. The driver hops off, the officers climb on, the door is shut. One officer stands in front, hand on his holstered weapon, facing the passengers. Another officer asks passengers to identify their carry-on luggage. All the while, the passengers are forced to sit, waiting. One Florida police officer testified that “during the previous nine months, he, himself, had searched in excess of three thousand bags.”12 Another court record indicated some 78,000 bus passengers had been searched this way.13

  Courts say incidents like these are not “searches” or “seizures” because people unhappy with these encounters are free to simply disregard the officers and go about their business. In legalese, they say people have “consented” to the intrusion, a notion that is one of the single greatest farces of the law today. People “consent” to being searched by police in such high numbers that even some judges cannot bring themselves to use that word to describe what is happening. Take Los Angeles. In one six-month period in 2006 the LAPD asked 16,228 drivers for consent to search their vehicles: 16,225 said yes, while just 3 said no. Over the same period, 99.9 percent of pedestrians who were stopped consented to searches when asked. People “consent” when they have nothing incriminating on them. They also “consent” when they have trunks full of drugs.14

  People succumb to these intrusions because they feel they have no choice. One bus interdiction officer conceded that it was “very rare for passengers to decline to be searched” and that “the overwhelming number … feel it is their duty to cooperate.” When Charles Carter said he was “ordered” out of his car, Maryland’s lawyer challenged the description, asking: “[W]hy do you perceive a question … ‘Would you please step out of the van?’—to be the same as an order?” Carter’s reply mirrors what most of us think: “If a policeman is to ask me something or tell me something, that’s an order.”15

  The Use of Force

  The use of force is arguably the most serious thing the government can do to its citizens. Force is central to policing; it is part of what cops are asked to do, part of the job. But today we have a culture of using force now, asking questions later. High-profile shootings have alerted us all to the issue, but the full extent of the problem sits hidden from our view.

  For shootings alone, the numbers are far too high. In 2015, police killed almost one thousand people, 10 percent of whom were unarmed. Take Houston, where on- and off-duty police killed some thirty-two people between 2013 and 2015, including four teenagers. A twenty-six-year-old student wearing a hoodie, who fled from an off-duty cop, was shot and killed. An officer with a prior shooting in his past killed a wheelchair-bound double amputee holding only a pen.16

  The problem goes well beyond guns, however. Lieutenant John Pike of the University of California Police became an Internet meme after coolly pepper-spraying peaceful protesters at UC Davis. He’s hardly alone. High school officials regularly pepper-spray students; a lawsuit in Alabama charges the use, on more than three hundred high school students, of a spray designed to cause “severe pain,” including “coughing, burning, blindness, [and] skin peeling.” Tasers can be a sensible alternative to lethal force; still, hundreds of Taser deaths occur, in part because police use them—against the manufacturer’s directions—on pregnant women, the disabled, and people lying in water. A babysitter called South Dakota police because an eight-year-old had a paring knife and supposedly had stabbed herself in the leg (she hadn’t); with four officers present, including a training instructor, they fired a Taser into the eight-year-old’s chest, the electrical charge throwing her against a wall.17

  Nothing is so revealing as the frequent use of SWAT raids—some 50,000 to 80,000 a year (again, no one can say for sure). Iraq War vet Alex Horton awoke on a Sunday morning to find himself on the muzzle end of the sort of raid he conducted in a war zone, simply because his landlord failed to notify suspicious neighbors that Horton was sleeping in another apartment while his was repaired. Why not investigate before bursting in, Horton asked the shift commander later. The reply? “It’s not standard to conduct investigations beforehand because that delays the apprehension of suspects.” Responding to a report of a drug deal, a Georgia SWAT team rammed their way into a home, unintentionally tossing a “flash-bang grenade into a playpen” of a baby. There was no suspect there (he was apprehended elsewhere without the use of SWAT). The child has undergone countless operations and is scarred for life. “Is it going to make us more careful in the next one?” the police said to a reporter. “Yes ma’am it is.”18

  Surveillance (and the Double Edge of Technology)

  Surveillance, too, has always been essential to police work. But government spying poses an enormous threat to liberty and free expression. Aided by the same advancing technology that makes it easier for us to communicate with one another, government snooping has become pervasive.

  The NSA has been collecting our phone call data for years, invoking national security as justification. However, it emerged in 2013 that, as part of Operation Hemisphere, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was doing the same, working closely with AT&T to access records for every call made through the AT&T system since as early as 1987.19

  Today, the government is able to track you through the cell phone in your hand, record your most private thoughts via the computer on your desk, and keep tabs on you from the skies above. Cops can extract the contents of cell phones in minutes, and download them into FBI-managed “kiosks.” Government spies use malware to hack and monitor computers, or watch people after secretly activating their webcams. Police forces use aircraft to spy on entire neighborhoods, with cameras able to track individual pedestrians. Pilotless aircraft soon will be omnipresent, from battlefield-tested Predator drones to hummingbird and mosquito drones, which can take a DNA sample without you knowing it. Closed-circuit television cameras and license plate readers are common; the use of facial recognition software is on the rise.20

  The product of all this surveillance is vast, barely regulated government databases storing records on all of us. The federal government has spent $2 billion to build an NSA data storage facility roughly five times larger than the U.S. Capitol Building. With federal money, state and local police forces have been creating “fusion centers” to collect and merge together existing databases that have our credit history, driver information, real estate information, criminal records (for those who have them), and more.21

  The Really Crazy Stuff

  All this is part of the humdrum, everyday policing; it doesn’t even begin to deal with the truly outrageous stuff—much of which flies entirely below the radar. Two professors, conducting a “ride-along” study with the police in the anonymous town of “Middleburg,” estimated that some 6–7 illegal searches per 100 residents happen each year. In one case, officers stopped a bicycle rider for no reason whatsoever and threatened to “fuck up his balls” unless he consented to a cavity search.22

  The invasions of people’s bodies are revolting. Officers throughout the country have conducted roadside digital anal and vaginal exams on the thinnest of pretexts. Two twenty-something women were cavity searched with children in the backseat. Another pair of women received the same treatment, the officer not bothering to change gloves between searches; nothing was found. People suspected of being under the influence who could not or would not urinate on demand have been tied to gurneys and forcibly catheterized. One man who would not sit still for catheterization was Tased into submission.23

  People are needlessly humiliated and their lives inappropriately endangered. An NYPD helicopter filming a nighttime, unpermitted group bike ride paused to shoot four minutes of a couple making love on a rooftop. The man involved said he was “usually in favor of surveillance”—it was “more the sensibility that the police think it’s O.K. that they do that—it’s about their professionalism.” Police have taken teenagers caught in possession of drugs and scared them into being informants, only to have them end up dead in grotesque gangland killings. Federal agents obtained a cell phone from a woman complicit in a drug offense and without her knowledge used her photos, including a picture of her in underwear and a photo of her minor son, to create a fake Facebook account to catch other suspects.24

  One wishes things like this could be attributed solely to bad apples, but incidents like these are all too common.

  Policing for Profit

  It’s important not to lose sight of a troubling motive for much of this conduct, something that is the antithesis of what policing should be about: raising money.

  The events in Ferguson brought to the country’s attention the extent to which municipalities use police to obtain funds, often from the least well-off. In Ferguson, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) found that “law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs.” Missouri’s Attorney General has since sued thirteen suburbs, claiming they were raising revenue beyond what state law permitted, by imposing undue traffic fines; Normandy, Missouri, brought in almost 40 percent of its revenue that way. What’s happening in Missouri goes on throughout the country.25

  But municipal fund-raising doesn’t hold a hat to the disgrace that the nation’s forfeiture laws have become. The original rationale behind forfeiture was that crime would be deterred if the government deprived the bad guys of their ill-gotten gains. So the law allows police forces to grab the goods and keep a share of the proceeds themselves. In the usual criminal case the government must prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. With forfeiture the standard is much lower, and the burden generally falls on the victim to get the property back. These laws have been subjected to extraordinary abuse; property has been seized on the thinnest of pretenses, feathering the pockets of law enforcement agencies. A twenty-two-year-old man left Michigan bound for a new career in Los Angeles carrying his life savings of $16,000 in cash; DEA agents took the money away with absolutely no evidence of wrongdoing. The DEA explained, “We don’t have to prove that the person is guilty. It’s the money that is presumed to be guilty.”26

  Annually, local, state, and federal police seize homes, cars, and millions of dollars in cash, much of it from innocent people. For many, these seizures are debilitating; this isn’t extra cash, it’s the sole means of transportation, hard-earned wages earmarked for medical procedures, the family home. At the same time departments have spent forfeiture proceeds on a range of remarkable things, including a $90,000 sports car; a quarter of a million dollars in donations to a sheriff’s alma mater; $20,000 for campaign ads; football tickets; and liquor and kegs for an employee barbecue.27

  Who Gets Policed

  You may be sitting there thinking, “This isn’t about me; I’m not a criminal.” Neither were the Carters nor most of the people you’ve read about thus far. That sort of complacency is a big part of the problem. The way policing is conducted today, everyone is a target, and we should all take it seriously.

  Of course, we’d be lying to ourselves if we do not recognize that policing often falls hardest on racial minorities, on the lower classes. Study after careful study confirms this. Perhaps this is the right moment to point out that the Carters were African American. They also were salt-of-the-earth, hardworking people who did not deserve what happened to them. Lieutenant Colonel Leatherbury—the supervisor who defended the actions of the cops in that case (and who was African American himself)—conceded that the racial disparities in traffic stops in Maryland were “glaring.” He did not think they were defensible. As FBI Director Comey recently had the courage to say, it’s time to face the “hard truths”—pointing to the role that unconscious (and conscious) racial bias has played in policing. If the head of the FBI can acknowledge this publicly, it is time we all do.28

  While this book is primarily about policing as it applies to all of us, it should be impossible to read the pages that follow and miss the undeniable role race and class play in policing. One chapter is devoted to the problem of racial profiling, and racial issues are omnipresent elsewhere. Still, as my beloved colleague the critical race theorist Derrick Bell, who passed away in 2011, would have said, the best way to tackle racism in policing may well be to understand that the problems of policing can and do affect everyone. What Bell recognized—he called this “interest convergence”—is that many more people get engaged to address a problem if they see how it has an impact on them directly.29

  It is simply naïve to think the sort of policing described here is something happening to “other” people, that it can’t affect you. You don’t ride the Greyhound bus, and aren’t worried about those searches? How about Amtrak? The mathematician Aaron Heuser was taking an Amtrak sleeper from his old position at the National Institutes of Health to a new job. The DEA came by and insisted he allow them to search his compartment. When he would not agree, they forced him to leave the room, certain he was transporting drugs. How did they “know”? (They were wrong.) Because he booked a sleeper car and traveled alone without checking luggage. Isn’t that what sleepers are for? When this story was published in The Atlantic, numerous other people wrote in to say the same sort of thing had happened to them.30

  Much of policing today is intentionally indiscriminate: it is aimed at all of us. The NSA’s data collection is in “bulk,” meaning the agency wants everyone’s information. We all are subjected to drunk-driving roadblocks and airport security; our location is recorded by license plate readers as we drive around town. Even when supposedly targeting just the guilty, law enforcement’s lack of care ensnares countless innocents. Millions of Americans are being subjected to this sort of policing.31

  The “war on drugs” has accounted for a great deal of aggressive policing, some of it utterly misguided. For example, the DEA’s “Operation Pipeline” emboldened state and local police to conduct as many ordinary vehicle stops as possible to try to ferret out drug couriers.32 Kansas’s Operation Pipeline manual is particularly eyebrow-lifting. It tells officers to rely on “high volume traffic stops” to catch those carrying drugs, and explains it “puts excitement into ordinary patrol.” Officers are instructed not to “profile” but to look for “indicators” of drug use or transportation, including “luggage,” “fast food wrapper[s],” “car phone/pager everyone has them” (how the fact that “everyone has them” helps identify traffickers is mystifying), and affixed “disclaimers” such as “police or religious symbols.” Officers are told to be watchful for “visual indicators” such as “eyes: the window to the soul.” Yet it seems almost anything you do with your eyes signals involvement with drugs: “eyes wide open (bug-eyed)” or “closes eyes hopes you’ll go away.” There is also “dry mouth,” “tugs at ears” or “plays with mustache,” and so on. A California legislative report—based on videotape of stops relying on just this sort of amateur psychology—concluded: “It was not uncommon to see travelers spending 30 minutes or more standing on the side of the road, fielding repeated questions about their family members, their occupations, their marital status, their immigration status, their criminal histories and their recreational use of drugs and alcohol.”33

  The war on terror has led to equally unjustified and undiscriminating intrusions. The federal government encourages local officials to file SARs—suspicious activity reports—that get fed into a nationwide database. Among the criteria utilized in Los Angeles are “using binoculars,” “taking notes,” and “drawing diagrams.” An accomplished photographer was stopped for trying to capture a piece of famous public art near Boston; a journalism student was interrogated in New York after taking photographs in front of a Veterans Affairs building, which the police erased.34

  In countless cases, law enforcement officials subject ordinary citizens to these sorts of personal invasions, based on little or no evidence. In protesting their treatment to those who seemed to think the Maryland State Police had done nothing wrong, the Carters felt compelled to volunteer “to submit to lie detector tests and furnish a legion of character references to attest to [their] reputation.” This seems to have the burden of proof rather backward, doesn’t it?35

  POLICING, OUT OF (POPULAR) CONTROL

  The question is, what should be done about all of this?

  As urgent as that question is, we cannot begin to answer it until we can see the problem clearly. And we do not. Despite all the media attention to the issues described here, all the task forces and government reports, the television talk shows, community forums, and academic gatherings, we remain blind to the central difficulty with policing today.

  We don’t even think about all these various practices, troubling as they are, as a single phenomenon. Each is a pinprick, an isolated issue, looking for its own solution. Officers involved in shootings of civilians draw attention to racial bias. Drones and cell phone tracking raise questions about individual privacy and technology. The events in Ferguson caused consternation about the militarization of policing. Forfeiture highlights the problem of policing for financial gain. The NSA’s activities are considered an entirely different thing altogether.36

  And yet, if we “connect the dots”—to use a phrase popularized by the 9/11 Commission report regarding intelligence gathering—we can see something fundamental that unites all of this.37