Arrest-Proof Yourself (24 page)

Hell’s Outlaws on Harleys are
more likely
to be arrestable than Mormon missionaries on bicycles.

Arabs are
more likely
to be terrorists than Eskimos are.

Here’s a real-life example. Several years ago a young female customs officer at a lonely Canadian border crossing stopped a truck driven by two Arabs who fit a terrorist profile for the following two reasons:

Both were nervous and sweating heavily in freezing weather.

Arabs look out of place in snow-covered forests.

The truck was filled with tons of ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel explosive. The guys were heading south to blow up Los Angeles International Airport. Moral of the story: profiling works.

Here’s another famous example. The sheriff of Volusia County, Florida, seizes almost as many illegal drugs each year as the entire federal government. He does this by profiling. He knows that the giant containers of dope that arrive in south Florida are split up into car-size loads, then dispatched up I-95, which runs through his county and is the main drug route for the U.S. east coast. He knows that car-size loads are almost always transported by Colombians, and that generally each dope-hauling vehicle will have a driver and a passenger riding shotgun. So he instructs his officers to stop all cars on I-95 that contain two Latins and are being
driven exactly at the speed limit
. Lawsuits have been filed by enraged Latin motorists (including some of the dope haulers!) who were stopped without having committed a traffic violation. Still the sheriff continues to find that an extraordinary percentage of cars he stops are jammed from floorboard to door knobs with pure cocaine.

You get the picture. Profiling by stereotype ignores a person’s individuality, but so what? Cops decide whether to pull over a car or stop someone on the street in a split second. When cops stop you, they’re not trying to imbibe the wondrous fullness of your being. They’re thinking about two things.

1.
ARE YOU ARRESTABLE?

2.
HOW MANY POINTS ARE YOU WORTH?

Heck, I’m the same way. When I run across you in jail, I’m thinking just two things.

1.
DO YOU HAVE A CASE I WANT?

2.
CAN YOU PAY MY FEE?

When your check clears there will be plenty of time for us to swap secrets and become best friends.

Profiling is difficult to challenge legally because police departments don’t write anything about profiling
on paper
that can be discovered by plaintiffs’ attorneys and presented as evidence of discrimination at trial. There’s no need. Cops pick up what they know from their partners and training officers and from scuttlebutt in the briefing room and the lockers. Think cops will testify against each other about profiling? Think again. Profiling lawsuits bother cops about as much as a wet kiss from a chubby baby.

Increasingly, profiles are not based on race, but on behavior, dress, and attitude because crooks act alike and look alike to an amazing degree. Check out the Cluelessness Chart again. If you hang out on the streets in view of cops; wear crazy hair and clothes; carry dope, guns, or stolen property; and drive with three hoodlum friends in a car with an expired tag and smoking tailpipe, you’re likely to get stopped and arrested. If you address police in an offensive manner, you’re likely to get a go-to-jail ticket with the big
F
for “felony” at the top.

If you have no time management and paperwork skills and no address, you’re going to get processed though the criminal justice sausage grinder until your life is a soft, bureaucratic mush. You will, however, have provided honest employment to numerous city and state employees who thank you secretly from the depths of their hearts. As for my bail bondsman buddy, he’s planning to build a marina, and hopes that you, yes you, will go to jail sometime soon. He needs your money.

We’ll end this chapter with an all-too-common scenario of how women are victimized by identity theft and get locked into cruddy jobs and bad neighborhoods by life sentences on the electronic plantation.

SCENARIO #5

CHECK STUB

Our heroine is a young African American woman who has clawed her way out of the social service plantation and the welfare system by doing everything right. When she was younger, she was a heroin addict and a prostitute. Most unusually, she was never arrested. She decided to quit the life and get the drug monkey off her back. Unable to obtain a place in overcrowded treatment centers to kick her habit, she had a friend lock her in a closet and spent three days screaming, vomiting, and having convulsions in order to quit cold turkey. After getting clean, she went through vocational rehabilitation training and received her GED at night school. Her child is in day care, and she has been working as a cashier for a grocery store chain for several years. She attends church regularly, never misses her meeting at Narcotics Anonymous, and will tell anyone who asks that Jesus is her
personal
Lord and Savior who has given her a second chance.

Unfortunately, the grocery store where she works stays open until midnight and is frequented by “jitterbugs” and “rock stars” who smoke crack and shoplift pseudoepinephrine decongestants, which they cook into methamphetamine. Meth makes people crazy, and there have been incidents at the store where street people have attacked shoppers with knives and guns. One meth-head had his veins explode
⁸
after he injected the drug, and he bled to death in the parking lot.

Our heroine can’t stand the neighborhood and spends every possible moment planning how to get out. She has shared slum apartments with a rotating cast of roommates, but is on a short list to receive a low-cost home from Habitat for Humanity. If everything goes right, she will own her own home in a better part of town, be able to care for her baby properly, and have a piece of the American Dream. The key is a job as a teller at one of the national banks. Such a job pays more than the grocery store and has better hours, nicer surroundings, and a health insurance plan that will allow her to get her baby treated by a real doctor instead of the nurse practitioners at the neighborhood clinics.

One night, while driving home from a church meeting in pouring rain, she drives through a stop sign and is pulled over by a police cruiser. In her vocational rehabilitation classes she learned to always have her license, insurance, and registration handy and to be polite with police officers. She hands these documents to the officer. He goes back to his cruiser and looks her up in the computer. She is shocked when he returns and arrests her for having outstanding warrants for check fraud.

Because it is late, she is unable to get a hearing or make bail, so she has to spend the night in jail with prostitutes and drug addicts who mock her nice clothes and call her “church girl.” Some of them wiggle their tongues at her and make lesbian come-ons. The next morning she calls church friends, who raise $5,000 to hire an attorney and get her bonded out of jail.

The attorney discovers that the warrants are really a case of identity theft. A former roommate had copied down her social security number, opened checking accounts under her name, and bounced checks for thousands of dollars all over town. The attorney was able to get the indictments quashed and the arrest records expunged.

A week later she called the bank to ask when she could have her first interview. The human relations specialist told her that all jobs had been filled. She thought this odd, since the bank continued to advertise for tellers in the local newspaper. She called week after week but was always told the same thing. Finally she took a day off from the grocery and drove to the bank and managed to talk her way into the human relations department. There one of the women took pity on her and explained that the bank had discovered her arrest on the bad-check charge. The bank had an ironclad policy of never hiring anyone with an arrest record, regardless of whether the arrest resulted in a conviction.

Devastated, our heroine went back to the grocery store. At church she prays now that one day she can get a promotion to assistant head cashier. This will bring her an additional dollar an hour in wages, qualify her for the Habitat house, and enable her to transfer to a suburban store away from the hellhole downtown. She does not pray for a nice man to marry her, however. She feels this would be asking too much. She thinks God is busy and can attend to her better if she asks for only one thing at a time.

THE MORALS OF THIS STORY

1. Identity theft is a common and growing crime that is devastating for victims. It can result in warrants and arrests since the victim is unaware of the bad checks because the phony checking accounts are set up with fictitious addresses and telephone numbers from stolen “burner” cell phones.

2. It is extremely expensive to clear up arrests and felony charges, even when they are baseless and the arrestee is completely innocent.

3. Banks, other private businesses, and many governmental agencies have, by federal law, been granted access to the NCIC (National Crime Information Center) run by the FBI. All adult arrests, including those for which charges are dropped, and
many juvenile arrests
are recorded by the NCIC.

4. The NCIC is the backbone of the electronic plantation. Once there, you have a life sentence that bars you from working in financial institutions, even if your arrest is not recorded on the data servers of the World Wide Web.

5. Keep social security cards and numbers, bank statements, and driver’s licenses under lock and key. Don’t show them to anyone other than officials entitled to see them.