How it got easier for cops to shake down minorities

 In the old days, the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution required police to establish "probable cause" to lawfully conduct certain searches and seizures or perform arrests.

As of 1968, police may stop you even without probable cause to believe you committed a crime. In the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Terry v. Ohio, justices formulated from whole cloth the less-than-probable-cause standard they called “reasonable suspicion,” aka "RS", which was comically and pedantically defined as the totality of specific and articulable facts and circumstances, taken together, that leads an officer to reasonably suspect a person may be engaged in criminal activity.

Cops never even need to name a specific law they think has been broken, nor do they even have to tell the “subject” the basis for the stop, unless he’s arrested or cited. The court pretended to establish some boundaries by requiring that an officer’s suspicion must be “particularized” and not generalized, that it has to be more than an “inchoate and unparticularized suspicion or hunch.”

The Terry case all but eviscerated the Fourth Amendment in stop-and-frisk cases. We see countless viral videos that depict cops stopping people just because "we got a call" or because they're opting to make an arbitrary investigation of some sort. That's fairly telling of officers' lack of understanding of the current state of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence and their own state laws.

Once an officer has established reasonable suspicion, he may briefly detain a person to investigate whether there is probable cause to make an arrest, or until his suspicions are dispelled, at which time the person would be free to go. If there’s additional “reasonable suspicion” to suspect the “subject” might be armed and dangerous, the officer can now do what’s called a “pat down” or frisk of exterior clothing for weapons, which is supposedly less intrusive than a regular search, which could entail digging into a person’s pockets.

Thank you, SCOTUS, for making it easier for opportunistic bullies to shake down people of lesser privilege just for kicks. This is, of course, a much easier job than conducting complex criminal investigations that are less likely to produce arrests and citations than these high-yielding stop & frisks.

All this is my own opinion, based on pertinent laws and relevant court cases I've read, as well as a healthy dose of videos showing cops behaving badly. Do your own work! Read laws and court cases for your jurisdiction, and subscribe to attorneys who have studied the law. Do not educate yourself by watching videos produced by people who speak as authoritative sources of knowledge. Good lawyers and journalists cite sources and show their work. Learn the difference!