America 2012: The Supreme Court Has Made It Legal For The Police To Strip Search You Any Time They Want

Last week the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that police in the United States can strip search anyone that they arrest.  It doesn’t matter how minor the crime is and it doesn’t matter if they suspect that you have contraband on you or not.

The Supreme Court even said that you can be strip searched if you have been arrested for a traffic violation.  Any type of arrest will do.  Once you are arrested, if the police want to strip off your clothes and see you naked there is not a thing you can do about it.

You can read the entire Supreme Court decision right here.  Considering the fact that 13 million Americans are put in jail at some point each year, this is a very frightening thing.  The notion that we are all “innocent until proven guilty” is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.  Thanks to the Supreme Court, it is now legal for the police to strip search you any time they want.  All they have to do is find some excuse to arrest you.  And considering the fact that almost everything is illegal in America, that is not hard to do.  America continues to become a very dark place in 2012, and very few people are speaking up in defense of liberty and freedom.

But don’t the police need probable cause before they search you?  Aren’t we protected against unreasonable searches by the U.S. Constitution?  After all, the 4th Amendment says the following….

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Unfortunately, not even the Supreme Court seems to care much about the U.S. Constitution anymore.

As I have written about previously, in the “new America” you don’t get any rights.

Instead, the government gives you a limited number of “privileges” that it can revoke at any time.

The story of the man that was at the heart of the Supreme Court case mentioned above demonstrates this.  His name was Albert Florence and he was arrested for not paying a fine that he had already paid.

But the fact that he was innocent didn’t seem to matter too much to the police.  They held him in prison for six days and strip searched him twice.  The following is how CNN described what Florence went through after his arrest….

Court records show Florence was subjected to an invasive strip and visual body-cavity search. He was then held for six days in the county lockup before being transferred to a Newark correctional facility, where, he claims, he was subjected to another more intrusive search before being placed in the general prison population.

‘It was very disgusting. It was just a bad, bad experience,’ he told CNN’s Kate Bolduan recently. ‘I was just told, “Do as you’re told.” Wash in this disgusting soap and obey the directions of the officer who was instructing me to turn around, lift my genitals up, turn around, and squat.’

Are you upset when you read that?

You should be.

You see, this is how totalitarian governments act.  Totalitarian regimes love to dehumanize and humiliate their “detainees” by stripping them naked.

So when we see this kind of behavior by authorities in the United States we should be very concerned.

And when we see the U.S. Supreme Court giving the stamp of approval to this kind of activity, we should be sounding the alarm.

At first, Americans were told that this kind of treatment would only happen to “prisoners of war” overseas. But then came the “enhanced pat-downs” from the TSA. Then we learned that the TSA was actually strip searching old women at our airports. And now we discover that strip searching will be legal for every single person that is arrested in the entire nation.

What in the world is happening to us?

Some will argue that if you don’t want to be strip searched that you should just avoid committing a crime. Well, in 2012 almost everything is a crime in America.

In fact, if you are just walking down the street minding your own business or even if you are in your own home doing absolutely nothing the police could still probably arrest you because there are probably about 1000 things that you are not doing that you are supposed to be doing.

And you know what horny police officers all over America are going to be thinking when they hear of this Supreme Court decision.

They are going to be thinking that it is now open season for strip searching beautiful women. There have already been hundreds of complaints that the TSA has been specifically targeting attractive women during airport security screenings.

Anyone that does not believe that police are going to do the exact same thing is being delusional.
In fact, we have already seen many examples of this around the country.  As I wrote about a while back, one group of female pro-life demonstrators was recently strip searched by police twice.  They didn’t do anything wrong and they should have never been arrested, but that didn’t prevent them from being strip searched in front of male police officers.

We have crossed a very dangerous line as a nation.

We have now gotten to the point where sexual humiliation is a standard law enforcement technique.
A recent article by Naomi Wolf detailed how the use of sexual humiliation as a control technique has been steadily increasing in our society in recent years….

Our surveillance state shown considerable determination to intrude on citizens sexually. There’s the sexual abuse of prisoners at Bagram – der Spiegel reports that ‘former inmates report incidents of … various forms of sexual humiliation. In some cases, an interrogator would place his penis along the face of the detainee while he was being questioned. Other inmates were raped with sticks or threatened with anal sex’. There was the stripping of Bradley Manning is solitary confinement. And there’s the policy set up after the story of the ‘underwear bomber’ to grope US travelers genitally or else force them to go through a machine – made by a company, Rapiscan, owned by terror profiteer and former DHA czar Michael Chertoff – with images so vivid that it has been called the ‘pornoscanner’.

We have all been told that we must sacrifice personal dignity for the greater good.

We have all been told that “national security” trumps our liberties and our freedoms.

But the further we go down this road, the more we become like Communist China, the USSR, North Korea and Nazi Germany.

In New York City, the police do not even need to arrest you in order to put their hands on you.  Officials in New York have implemented a nightmarish “stop-and-frisk” policy.  During 2011, there were 684,330 “stop and frisk” searches in New York City.  Mayor Bloomberg contends that these unconstitutional searches are necessary to keep the city safe.

But even if you don’t go outside you can still be stopped and frisked.  Thousands of apartment buildings in New York have signed up for the “Clean Halls” program which allows police officers to freely roam the hallways of apartment buildings and stop anyone that they want for any reason.

The following is how a recent Rolling Stone article described this program….

According to the NYCLU, which filed the suit, ‘virtually every private apartment building [in the Bronx] is enrolled in the program,’ and ‘in Manhattan alone, there are at least 3,895 Clean Halls Buildings.’  Referring to the NYPD’s own data, the complaint says police conducted 240,000 ‘vertical patrols’ in the year 2003 alone.

If you live in a Clean Halls building, you can’t even go out to take out the trash without carrying an ID – and even that might not be enough. If you go out for any reason, there may be police in the hallways, demanding that you explain yourself, and insisting, in brazenly illegal and unconstitutional fashion, on searches of your person.

Can you see where all of this is going?

We are rapidly becoming a society where there is absolutely no privacy left and where citizens are routinely dehumanized and humiliated.

If those in charge of protecting us cannot keep us safe and respect our liberties and our freedoms at the same time, then they should resign and give their jobs to someone else.

Many of the things that are being done in this nation right now in the name of “security” are absolutely shameful.  Our leaders are turning their backs on what it means to be American, and millions of citizens all over the country should be howling in disgust.

Unfortunately, most people seem to be buying in to the “new America”, and the U.S. Supreme Court has just given police departments all over the country the green light to strip search citizens any time they want.

Oh how far you have fallen America. 

This article first appeared here at the American Dream.  Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here.