Read The Rights of the People for Free Online Page A

under their arms, along their sides, squeezing lumps in their pockets, down the inside and outside of their legs. LeFande stood by, cradling a shotgun over an arm, like a prison guard making sure inmates in the chain gang didn’t run off from their highway jobs.
    Walking to and from their cars, the cops took little detours to peer into bushes, along walls. “We were told they keep the guns in the alley,” Neill said. “We ain’t never found them.”
    Suddenly we spotted a sedan stopped in the middle of the street, a black woman standing nearby. “Baby, got anything in the car?” Neill asked. He and LeFande looked with flashlights through the windows but didn’t search, just checked her license and registration. Blocking traffic is arrogant, a way of stating your status, Neill said as we pulled away. “You can’t do that unless you got a gun in the car.” But the Power Shift almost always let “girls” go without a search; Neill played the odds, and the odds were that the guns were with the men. When we cruised up beside an expensive-looking white sedan, Neill saw that the driver was a woman and moved on.
    Neill’s team profiled vehicles as well as people. If they spotted something expensive—a Cadillac, a big SUV—or the opposite, a broken-down old car, they’d try to find some minor violation to excuse a stop: tinted windows, decorative lights, a hanging air freshener blocking vision, all infractions of the D.C. code, designed to give cops maximum latitude to investigate suspicious drivers. In fact, the Power Shift carried a handy tool in the search for guns: a tint meter. When the edge of a car window is inserted into a groove, the meter displays the percentage of light getting through. The law requires at least 70 percent for side windows in the front, 50 percent in the back. 12
    Next came a demonstration of how the Power Shift stopped vehicles in these poor, black neighborhoods—nothing as tame as approaching from behind with flashing lights and a siren. LeFande followed a white Cadillac as it turned a corner and slowed at the next intersection. Then he cut shorty, hitting the gas, wheeling around in front, and blocking the vehicle. All the while, Neill was chattering on his handheld radio, instructing his squad on how to converge on the Cadillac.
    Inside, a black man sat smoking a cigarillo and trying to look casual. Neill leaned through the driver’s window, chatted him up while looking around the passenger compartment for anything “in plain view.” Six patrol cars pulled up one by one to fill the block, but the driver seemed to stay cool.
    LeFande, standing aside with me, offered a running commentary. Neill was hovering to restrict the driver’s movement, he explained, and other officers needed to stay out of the “kill zone,” where a bullet could reach them should the driver pull a gun. It’s best to put a vehicle, preferably the engine block, between you and the subject. Notice, LeFande said, how the spotlights and headlights from behind are designed to reflect off his rearview mirror into his face to place him under stress and destroy his concentration. “You see,” LeFande said, “he’s trying to find his documents, but he can’t see. He’s under stress.”
    And in this atmosphere a driver is supposed to make an uncoerced, voluntary decision on waiving his Fourth Amendment rights. Having created stress, Neill tried to read the level of nervousness and make his judgments accordingly. When he asked for consent to search the white Cadillac, he told me later, the driver came back sharply: “You got probable cause?”
    “I said, ‘I don’t have probable cause. I’m asking your permission,’ ” Neill reported.
    “I don’t give it,” the driver replied, according to Neill. So Neill tried to soften him up. He got talking with him about his Cadillac, what year it was, how he had maintained it so well, while another officer took the man’s license back to a patrol car equipped with