Arrest-Proof Yourself (29 page)

When questioned, the chemist stood mute and police were not able to make an arrest. Subsequently he sold his house and left his girlfriend, and is thought to have assumed a new identity and resumed operations in another city. When police obtained court orders to investigate his known income, they quickly became lost in a maze of corporations in the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, and Panama. When they investigated his driver’s license, they discovered it had been obtained with a phony birth certificate.

THE MORALS OF THIS STORY

1. This subject is a police nightmare: a savvy crook who works alone and does not discuss business with his women or friends.

2. Because of his general unobtrusiveness and care to drive nondescript, legal vehicles, he is almost immune from arrest by routine policing and traffic stops. Even for police detectives, this guy is a tough nut.

3. Investigating his financial affairs would require the active assistance of the U.S. Departments of State, Treasury, and Justice to enforce treaty obligations with foreign governments. For police departments, obtaining such cooperation is difficult.

4. He could be investigated by the FBI or the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which have more resources than local police, but a successful prosecution would require an enormous investment of agents and resources to keep up with the chemist’s frequent moves, changes of identity, and wary business practices that negate the government’s most powerful investigative tools: consensual monitors, wiretaps, and confidential informants.

9

SOME MODEST SUGGESTIONS

T
his is a save-your-butt book, not a save-the-world book. Nonetheless, I want to suggest several needed reforms of the criminal justice system. These will require years of advocacy, legislation, and court rulings to enact. One suggestion, the court phone, will require an entrepreneur with the money, smarts, and patience to build the phone and then navigate the torturous government procurement process.

1. ABOLISH PROBATION.
The current probation system was originally conceived as a humane way to lessen prison sentences and prepare inmates for freedom. In practice it’s become the funnel back into the criminal justice sausage grinder. The reason? Probation requires
skills
that clueless people don’t have, such as time management, calendaring, and good manners in dealing with government employees. It also requires
things
clueless people don’t have, such as telephones, reliable cars, and mailing addresses. How would you like to be tossed into jail for failing to show up at a meeting or to return a phone call?

Here’s how things go down in real life. A clueless misdemeanor offender will be offered a choice of sentence by the prosecutor such as
either
90 days in jail
or
immediate release and two years’ probation. The clueless gork invariably chooses release and inevitably violates probation. Then he’s charged with violation of probation (VOP) and “VOPed” back into the system. This time, however, the offender is charged with a felony and faces a longer sentence, followed by more probation and yet more chances to get VOPed right back into the maw of the machine. Probation is not a stride toward freedom; it’s outdoor jail.

2. THREE CITATIONS AND YOU’RE OUT.
Possession of small quantities of drugs, and annoyances such as acting out in front of cops, should be penalized with a citation rather than arrest. This citation should be given on the spot, with a thumbprint and digital photo for identification. This is different from a notice to appear, which requires the offender to go to court and be liable to conviction, arrest, and jail.

The merits of the citation system are threefold. First, it saves people whose basic offense is being clueless, bad mannered, and stupid from being arrested, incarcerated, and sent to jail and the plantations. Second, it tags clueless people without an arrest. Third, information from this citation does not interface with state or federal systems; it is for in-house use only. If they get three citations, then they deserve to be arrested as chronic offenders. It directs police to arrest real bad guys and deemphasizes vacuuming up clueless people to score arrest points.

3. DRUG COURTS OUTSIDE THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM.
Drug courts are springing up in jurisdictions throughout America. All sentence drug users to treatment rather than prison. The shortcoming of drug courts is that they still involve arrests, jail, and lifetime sentences on the electronic plantation. Until privacy laws restrict the reporting of arrests that do not result in conviction, drug courts must be administered in a way that is not reportable on the NCIC and the World Wide Web. The presiding officers need to be magistrates rather than judges, and should be people whose main qualification is common sense rather than a law degree.

4. DECRIMINALIZATION OF SMALL QUANTITIES OF DRUGS FOR PERSONAL USE.
An enormous percentage of people arrested are charged with misdemeanor drug possession, which means possession of small amounts for personal use. In many states, the quantity of drugs that will get you busted is extremely small. In Florida, that amount is 20 grams (less than 3/4 ounce) of marijuana, and any quantity at all of heroin or crack cocaine. Most drug users are pitiful, clueless idiots, not criminals. Raising the weight limit of drugs that constitutes a misdemeanor would empty the jails of petty offenders.

5. CLUELESS-PEOPLE MANAGEMENT.
Petty offenders are routinely sentenced to drug courts, anger-management classes, and other nonprison alternatives. I suggest the creation of cluelessness-management courses, which might also be entitled Life Lessons for Dummies.

Even professional social workers often have no idea how socially primitive clueless people are. The clueless urgently need Life 101 training. The first lesson? Time, and why the wristwatch, the alarm clock, and the calendar matter. This will support the imperatives of the Welfare Reform Act, which is forcing millions of clueless people to work. Work is a powerful socializer, and the only mechanism for socialization that can possibly be successful with adults who were raised without effective parents. No one, however, can learn job skills and rudimentary good manners unless they can wake up, dress up, and show up.

6. SINGLE HEARINGS.
Almost all criminal justice sentencing is via negotiated pleas that avoid the necessity of trial. The problem is that in the course of the plea bargaining, multiple calendar hearings are held, during which the judge inquires about the progress of the negotiations. Defendants are often required to appear at these pro forma proceedings. Given the staff effort and time needed to merely locate, much less awaken, clothe, and transport defendants, these proceedings should be compressed into a single hearing for petty offenses. If hearings were held after 11:00 A.M. it would be helpful. Clueless people cannot, repeat
cannot
, get it together before that hour.

7. SHRINK THE ELECTRONIC PLANTATION.
The United States urgently needs privacy laws. Reports of arrests that do
not
lead to convictions should be available only to law enforcement and absolutely denied to private companies and individuals. They should also be denied to
judges
. Reason? Judges routinely consider prior arrests, not convictions, in setting sentences. This is an outrage.

8. ABOLISH POLICE PINBALL.
Cops shouldn’t be encouraged to play games with people’s lives. Police should be rated, promoted, and compensated the way federal law enforcement officers are—by the quality, not the quantity, of arrests. What counts are arrests leading to convictions, not just the number of dummies vacuumed off the pavement and tossed into the sneezer.

9. ESTABLISH ON-DUTY PROSECUTORS AND STATE’S ATTORNEYS.
Having prosecutors available 24/7 to consult with police by telephone will allow the state to make a preliminary determination about whether there is probable cause for an arrest, whether there is evidence to make a case, and whether a person stopped by police should be arrested or freed. This enhances the state’s ability to protect citizens while safeguarding individual rights and discouraging mass arrests on flimsy pretexts.

10. COURT PHONES.
This is my own flash of genius-level insight, which I will promote herewith. One thing you can always count on with clueless people is a tendency to vanish. Many have cell phones, but these are often stolen “burner” phones, which are likely to conk out any minute when the free airtime expires and just as likely to be answered by someone who stole the phone a second time or picked it up behind a table at some bar.

My suggestion is the court phone, a specialized cell phone. First, it would have no dial pad, so it could not be used for outgoing calls and would have no resale value to invite theft. Second, only attorneys and court officers would have court-phone numbers. Thus the only callers would be officers of the court, and their only purpose would be to wake up defendants and get them to dress up and mosey on down to court, preferably post-breakfast, postcoffee, and postcigarettes.

The court phone is really just a voice version of the hockey puck beepers that chain restaurants give out that buzz and blink when your table is ready or your food is done. Naturally, the court phone would not have an off switch. It would also have a GPS locator chip so that investigators could periodically sweep through bars and hangouts and scarf up phones that get separated from overly relaxed defendants.

Perhaps the court phone would be better designed as a Dick Tracy wrist radio attached with a titanium steel band and non-pickable lock. It could be removed only by a court officer or someone adept (highly adept) with a torch or diamond drill.

This is it for our brief overview of the criminal justice system. As I’ve said, the system isn’t fair. What matters is that the system exists, and you have to deal with it as it is. So we’ll spend no more time pondering reforms and instead concentrate, in Parts II and III, on practical arrest-proofing methods to keep you out of jail
right here, right now!

PART II

ARREST PROOFING ON THE STREETS

10

COP A ’TUDE AND YOU GET SCREWED

P
eople get arrested all the time for copping a
^’
tude with cops.
^’
Tude
is short for
attitude
, defined as being defiant, rude, and in your face. Too many people consider attitude to be more “real” than polite behavior. In a perfect world, being obnoxious would not be a crime. Right now, in these United States, attitude will earn you a ride downtown, a strip search, and a diet of beanie-weenies and baloney sandwiches.

When you get an attitude, you’re helping the cops, not yourself. Attitude does the following things.

It turns a routine inquiry (“Hey you, c’mere!”) into an opportunity to make an arrest.

It allows police to use “inciters” to make you flee, strike an officer, or resist.

When you
^’
re upset, you
^’
re vulnerable because your emotions are raging and you can’t think clearly. Cops will take advantage of this, intensify routine questioning, and then search you and your vehicle. They may use inciters, such as whispered insults or a quick poke with the baton. If they’re successful in provoking you, they can upgrade a simple inquiry, traffic ticket, or misdemeanor into a felony bust. This scores more points for the cops. For you it doubles your legal fees, sends your bail amount soaring, and guarantees a stretch in the pen. It also puts a serious crime header on your NCIC information, so you can count on a lifetime of tough police scrutiny.