A Stitch in Haste

The District of Columbia's subway bureaucracy has announced that it will commence warrantless, suspicionless searches at subway entrances:
The program is modeled after one begun three years ago in New York that has withstood legal challenges. However, experts said it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of such searches, beyond assuring the public that police are [...]

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Students "do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate." Except when they do…
ITEM: When science class becomes "forensic science" class —
A science teacher at Comstock Middle School [in Dallas] is accused of trying to use a little bit of science to track down her missing belongings.
"She said some of the students [...]

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This was absolutely not the kind of "reform" I was hoping for:
The NYPD lieutenant from Long Island who authorized the use of a stun gun during a fatal police confrontation with a naked Brooklyn psychiatric patient committed suicide Thursday morning, police said.
On his 46th birthday, Lt. Michael Pigott of Sayville shot himself at Floyd Bennett [...]

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Just when you think the incidents can't get any more absurd or outrageous:

To say, "What were these cops thinking?" is too generous — they obviously weren't thinking at all. Which is the whole problem with prevailing law enforcement attitudes toward the Taser. The willingness to use the device, not as a substitute to the use [...]

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To review: I consider Taser use to be acceptable only as alternative to the use of deadly force, not as an alternative to mere exertion by a law enforcement officer, and certainly not as an alternative to calling for backup. The Taser is meant to save lives, not to save overtime charges and certainly not [...]

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"…it is constitutional, because the courts say it is constitutional…"
–Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, on the federal government's policy regarding search and seizure of electronic devices at border points.
Introduction
For some time now there has been a growing agitation, especially in the blawgosphere, over the increasing incidence of searches of laptops and other data storage devices [...]

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Reason laments the use by law enforcement of consent searches to evade the Fourth Amendment's requirement of probable cause to search or seize:
The other day, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois issued a report on "consent searches" that sometimes accompany traffic stops. Relying on data provided by local and state law enforcement agencies, the [...]

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Two separate jurisdictions have recently enacted "saggy pants" policies that pose fairly obvious constitutional issues.
First, the police chief of Flint, Michigan, has issued an almost comically elaborate set of guidelines regarding the practice (which, incidentally, some insist is gang-related signaling, while others dismiss it as youthful "fashion rebellion") —
A Class C offense, exposing a [...]

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Unfortunately, he was the dissenter:
History tells us that it is not the fact that a constitutional right is at issue that portends the outcome of a case, but rather what specific right we are talking about. If it is free speech, freedom of religion, or the right to bear arms, we are quick to strike [...]

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Guess who wants your data records kept secret — very secret:
The New York Police Department is appealing an order to release an internal database of hundreds of thousands of street stops of pedestrians to civil rights advocates who want to analyze it for evidence of racial bias.
…
In a decision in May on the New York [...]

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