Originally Posted by
chollie
F4, your answers are thorough and straight from the manual. They do not reflect actual practice. They reflect the official line.
What is the purpose of the CBP roadblock? To ascertain citizenship? Or a catch-all (like TSA checkpoints have become) to check for any sort of offense, citizenship-related or not?
If the former, then it is clear that if a CBP agent has asked the question - US citizen? - and gotten a clear and unambiguous answer, any further questions or secondary or delays on the part of CBP are clearly either a fishing expedition or the result of 'suspicion', suspicion that can be, according to you and others, based on nothing more than the CBP agent's gut feeling (twitches, bits of behavior, mud on the car, bla-bla).
To be very clear: if I am stopped at a roadblock and asked my citizenship and I reply 'US', any further CBP action beyond sending me my way, any further questions, indicate a level of suspicion - and that's never good from the perspective of an innocent-but-guilty-until-CBP-verifies-you're-innocent' citizen. What other reason is there for a CBP to continue to question me?
Unless, of course, the roadblocks are there to check for much more than just citizenship - traffic violations, drug smuggling, fugitives...
Isn't it interesting that the only time you even mention video, it is to point out the weaknesses that exonerate CBP under examination? Are you aware of a single instance in which examination of video demonstrated that CBP had, in fact, not been truthful about the events that took place?
As you know, such instances are shockingly common with LE - shocking, because if you're an LE on camera, surely you know even better than the public what's being captured on a dash cam.
Again, I will have to disagree with you. The answers I am giving you and everyone else on here are most certainly actual practice. The majority of, I am not limiting this to CBP or BP, law enforcement officers do their job correctly. It is clear that you do not believe that. There is nothing that I am going to say that will change that perception.
You should understand that your perception clouds what you believe that you know about the law, and rules in which law enforcement are allowed and required to operate under.
You believe that all an CBP agent is allowed to ask is citizenship related questions and any other questions should not be allowed. You are entitled to your opinion. However, that is not reality nor actual practice. If a state or local officer stops you for a traffic violation, is he limited to only talking about that traffic violation or does he ask other things. The law enforcement officer's job is always to ascertain if there is probable cause to believe there is illegal activity occurring. This is done by observation, and asking questions. Even though it appears that you don't believe it to be the case law enforcement officers are not required to have any suspicion what so ever to ask questions. Law enforcement officers are by nature curious, inquisitive people. There really is no other way to do the job. That is why the courts have allowed the techniques the officers use to do the job.
I will again try to explain my personal opinion regarding video. You are absolutely correct. I am well aware of what can and does get captured on a dash cam or any video camera in fact much more aware and knowledgeable than yourself. I have in previous posts tried to explain to you why video is not the end all be all evidence that you believe that it is. Certainly not the video that most of the general public sees. Video is a great tool if you understand the limitations of what it can and can't do. The video clips that we are all most familiar with are U tube videos and news media videos. Almost without fail those videos are edited. You don't get to see the whole thing. You only get a two dimensional narrow view. You aren't seeing the scene in the same way or light (I will touch more on that in a second) that the participants in the event see it. In video angles can mean everything. As I said before, I can show you numerous videos that you would swear that the authorities were absolutely wrong. However, after all the facts were discovered and investigated the exact opposite conclusion than what was drawn from the video was in fact true.
When I mentioned light above I was not referring to brightness. What I meant was you are not seeing the events transpire in the same way that an officer will see events transpire. This is because of the officer's training and experience. There is an ongoing phenomena in this country concerning law enforcement and video. The public believes that they can watch video, critique and decide if what they are seeing is correct or not. They do this without the benefit of any training, legal knowledge, or experience. If this is possible, why are the governments wasting all this time, money, and resources to send law enforcement officers to training academies. Why are we spending more money to update that training when things change. Why don't we just throw people in uniforms and send them out to work. After all look at the individuals in the public that can recognize the proper way to do things and the proper decisions to make without any of those pesky things like knowledge of law and policies, training or experience. Sounds ridicules doesn't it, because it is.
You really don't have this type of belief in other professions. You don't have the public watching video of houses being built, fires being put out, surgeries being performed, planes being flown, or any other number of activities being performed by the practitioner of that profession and the public believing they have the qualifications to judge if it was done correctly.
That being said I agree that video has its place. It is tool that can be used to document and recreate events. That video should be evaluated by individuals that are trained to recognize what they are looking at. They should have an understanding of the rules that apply and ideally have experienced applying to rules, laws, and performing the tasks that they are evaluating. They should also be able to take other evidence such as physical evidence, witness statements, into account you know those types of things that the general public do not have access to when they are judging these events.
The environment that I have operated in since I started this career has been under constant video surveillance. That is the nature of where I have been assigned. I have certainly seen officers disciplined due to video. It is the nature of human beings. They are not perfect. They make mistakes. The other problem that enters into this equation is that is usually is not matter of the agency, mine or otherwise, not being truthful. It usually is a matter of the agency is not allowed to comment one way or the other due to privacy laws. It very often is unfortunate because the agency and through association the officer doesn't really get to defend themselves until the event has worked it through the system. By that time, the public as judged the event on incomplete or inaccurate information and is not interested in the actual outcome because they have moved on to the next one.
FB