The New 'Standard Police Practice'
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union THE NEW 'STANDARD POLICE PRACTICE' BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS "The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion." -Edmund Burke Wilton, Connecticut They poured...
...In any case, "standard police practice" does not excuse secret and unsavory policies...
...In Wilton, the bugs on the blueprints were to be none of our affair...
...He assured Mrs...
...As Judge Learned Hand observed, "Thai community is already in the process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy...
...Yet when word got back to our police chief, Robert J. North-cott, that we were worrying about the bugs, his first response was, "How did they find out...
...Yesterday I called the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union in Hartford...
...A few weeks ago, according to the New York Times, a government official in Paris warned the French Senate that government wiretapping "was none of its affair...
...With an overhear system our officer could hear him and bring him assistance...
...Something is quietly occurring here that, in its municipally folksy way, is as dangerous as Watergate and as subversive of our system of justice as would be repeal of the Fifth Amendment...
...They deserve an adequate place in which to work...
...Meanwhile, construction on the new police station, future home of the new "standard police practice," is continuing-en schedule and within budget...
...Can it be that we in Wilton have grown so indifferent to civil liberties, our own as Well as others', that we now draw bugs on our blueprints...
...Another equally reliable source, however-who requested anonymity -said he knew for a fact that the police department in Cheshire, Connecticut, hides a microphone in the interview room where prisoners confer with their lawyers, and secretly tapes the conversations...
...A few days ago a friend and I went to see him...
...Prisoners delight in throwing coffee at the camera leus...
...The Cheshire police would neither confirm nor deny...
...On the builder's blueprints the microphones are designated as "overhear devices...
...During the Watergate spectacle we have heard operatives like Barker and McCord blandly explain that they based their criminal acts on suspicions that the Democrats were consorting with Castro...
...In a comment concerning the same Supreme Court case, Justice Holmes labeled wiretapping "a dirty business," and expressed the opinion that it was "less evil that some criminals escape than that the government should play an ignoble part...
...That's been known to happen...
...Knauth is the only female police commissioner in Connecticut, possibly in the world...
...Actually," he concluded, "I can't get too excited about the overhear system one way or the other...
...For example: "What if an intoxicated man was sick...
...I would like to forget the bugs and move on to points less fine...
...The commission is supposed to set policy for our police force the way the Board of Education sets policy for our schools...
...The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding...
...I watched them awhile, and wondered how many individual liberties of the sort Burke treasured we were inadvertently burying in the wet cement...
...I find this incredible...
...Perhaps somebody should have pointed out to him that Wilton's jail is being built to detain individuals who have not yet been arraigned, much less indicted, much less convicted, and every schoolchild knows that a bedrock of American justice is the presumption of innocence...
...And if he's guilty...
...That's not standard police practice," he replied...
...One of the commissioners is a lawyer...
...It's the usual police procedure...
...After those phone calls I was more worried than ever...
...He instinctively preferred secrecy to publicity...
...That was Justice Louis Brandeis in 1928...
...in the morning they will face a judge...
...President Nixon had the same reaction when Daniel Ellsberg unveiled the Pentagon Papers...
...They represent the public...
...He had never heard of bugged cells...
...Is that what we mean by long-range planning...
...Moreover, if we invade a man's privacy on the grounds that he is a prisoner, and therefore less a man, we instantly invite the next step?invading a man's privacy because he is under suspicion, i.e., because he is a potential prisoner...
...Most jails use them...
...Nobody's supposed to know...
...Last year Wilton's police investigated more than 2,300 cases, including 615 automobile accidents, 132 breakings and enterings, 168 larcenies, 100 breaches of the peace, and 40 instances of missing persons...
...There was no harm in a bit of illegal wiretapping, they reasoned, if it would rescue the country from the clutches of a foreign enemy...
...And in Stratford, he added, the cells are monitored by a TV camera with a microphone attached...
...I hope they do...
...In the end, the phrase serves as a soporific catchall, promoting the illusion among citizens that they need not ask hard questions, that they are in good hands with the State...
...The Chief smiled and shook his head...
...People tell me that Chief North-cott is a decent man, and I have no reason to doubt their word...
...To learn more about what is "standard" I called an expert, Frank Donner, who is completing a book on surveillance methods in America...
...No spur-of-the-moment spying...
...I next telephoned Robert Meek, chairman of the Citizens' Building Committee, which is entrusted with keeping a sharp eye on construction of the police station...
...Even with my own kids I wouldn't dream of picking up the extension and listening in on their phone conversations...
...he was talking, of all things, about wiretapping...
...I know Chief Northcott won't abuse it...
...My companion said, "But if the microphone is for the man's own good, why don't you tell him about it in advance, when he enters the cell...
...I see youi point," he said to me...
...Still, instead of forgetting, I continue to read up on the law and find quotations suitable to the occasion...
...Why should I carp at the work of honorable men like Bob Meek and Chief Northcott who are trying to accomplish something useful for the town...
...They may investigate...
...Other people in town are also troubled...
...In French jurisprudence a man is considered guilty until proven innocent...
...They were strictly police business...
...That much said, he nevertheless went on: "It's maybe too fine a point...
...He reaffirmed that the taps would continue in a wide variety of cases...
...The station per se is not the problem...
...Edmund Burke Wilton, Connecticut They poured concrete today for our new, half-million-dollar police station behind Town Hall...
...Nothing wrong with that...
...Knauth that the microphones would be legal because prisoners do not have the same rights as other citizens...
...My job is to see that the building gets completed on time and within budget...
...He could choke to death on his own vomit...
...I'm there to serve the police chief and the commission...
...He received us cordially...
...The Chief explained that the microphones were being placed in the ceiling for the prisoners' own good...
...I don't believe in this Big Brother stuff...
...The new headquarters will contain four jail cells-waystops for persons arrested too late in the day to be arraigned, or for drivers considered too drunk to proceed safely...
...It makes for an unfair fight...
...After our talk with Chief North-cott I called Janet Knauth, a member of the town's three-person Police Commission...
...he's a good man...
...But the ceiling above the cells will have two hidden microphones-concealed bugs-wired to a receiving set in another part of the station...
...These citizens will be detained overnight...
...They agreed that what Wilton plans to do in its jail is "a dirty business...
...Do we want that...
...Besides, if a person's innocent, what has he got to fear...
...Nearly everyone in the community understands that our 28-man police force, presently housed in the Town Hall cellar, requires a better facility...
...it also renders the defendant fair game for certain "standard police practices...
...She told me she had already raised the question with the other commissioners, and they had decided "the advantages of an overhear system outweighed the disadvantages...
...It's not a bug," he told us, "it's an overhear system...
Vol. 56 • July 1973 • No. 15
