Officer.com Police Blogs & Podcasts

Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

First, thanks to all of you who remembered me in your prayers for a safe trip across the northern states to Washington. I made it in one piece, even if my windshield didn’t, owing to a airborne rock somewhere in North Dakota. But windshields can be replaced, and this one has been already. My life is still in cardboard boxes, but that’s a temporary situation, too.

There has been such an embarrassment of riches for those of us that watch and pundit the criminal justice system. Two incidents from last week come to mind, though, because they intersect on the same issue. First, a woman in Tampa reported that she had been raped, and wound up in jail after she was found to have outstanding arrest warrants in her name. This was aggravated when a jail employee refused to dispense the second dose of a morning-after pill because the procedure conflicted with her religious beliefs.

The second story, only a day later, came from Kansas City. Two KCMO officers saw Sofia Salva place a faked temporary registration tag in the window of her car, and stopped her to investigate. She complained that she was pregnant and bleeding, and needed to get to a hospital to deal with a possible miscarriage. Finding that Salva also had outstanding warrants, as well as the fake registration tag, they arrested her and booked her into the jail. She was released the following day, when she gave birth to a premature baby boy who died shortly afterward.

I stress here that I don’t know any more about these events than what was in the articles carried here at Officer.com, and there are undoubtedly unreported or misreported factors on both sides. I’m only commenting on the situation as it was presented, which may or may not be what actually happened.

Both these cases fall into the little bit wrong/little bit right box, not that the “right” part will keep the cops from being sued for more money than either arrestee would otherwise see in their lifetime. The reason that the lawsuits will probably result in a plaintiff’s verdict is that there is a clear duty for anyone who deprives another of their freedom to ensure that their prisoner is looked after. Officers have a special obligation here. When their prisoner is no longer able to move to avoid a hazard, defend themselves, or obtain basic necessities, the obligation to provide this falls on the officer or his/her employer. Both of these women had clear medical issues that should have been attended to promptly. I’m surprised that the KCMO officers could even get their prisoner admitted at the jail. If she was complaining of vaginal bleeding (a condition that’s pretty easy to verify), most jails would have refused to accept her until she was medically cleared. Similarly, the rape victim had a need for post-traumatic counseling and access to the drug that would keep her from becoming pregnant. Religious conviction is not a factor here. Catholic pharmacists dispense birth control pills, and pro-life police officers have stood guard outside of abortion clinics to keep protesters from blocking the entrances. At least one of the bartenders in the Salt Lake City airport is a card-carrying Mormon. If you have that much conflict between your job and your religion, then you need to make an adjustment in one or the other.

So, that’s the “wrong” part. The “right” part was that the officers in both cases followed the orders of the court and arrested the people named in the warrants. The wording of arrest warrants varies from place to place, but the ones I used to serve started out something like this:

To any marshal, policeman, or other peace officer in [state]: You are commanded to arrest the person named herein and bring them before me forthwith to answer to a charge of [offense]…

Nothing in that wording sounded optional or discretionary to me. A judge once told me that he would hold in contempt any officer who had knowledge of the existence of an arrest warrant and failed to make at least an attempt to serve it, knowing that the person named in the warrant was available to him. Some cops thought, and probably still think, that arrest warrants are like any other charge, where the officer has discretion to arrest or not. Maybe that’s true for you, but it wasn’t the case where I worked.

I did, however, run across people who believed they were immune from arrest for one reason or another. They would cite a medical condition, or a connection with some influential person, or in one memorable case, some kind of diplomatic immunity based on their permanent residency in a neighboring state. A fellow officer observed that he now understood what the National Guard was for–if necessary, we were prepared to go to war with Utah.

I imagine that people have come up with even more creative reasons why they can’t be arrested. It’s a variation on the ancient benefit of clergy. If you search for that in your state code, you’ll probably find a reference to it someplace, usually declaring that it doesn’t apply there. The benefit of clergy came about in the middle ages, when about the only people that could read were members of religious orders. Their status and governance fell outside the rule of the King, as they were regarded as accountable to only God and the religious hierarchy above them. There weren’t any membership cards or secret handshakes, so the nuns, monks and priests proved their status by reading aloud from the Bible. Psalm 51 was a popular choice, and even became known as the “neck verse,” as reading it could save one’s neck. Poseurs could make a run at getting off by memorizing the 51st Psalm, pretending they could read before the court. Sometimes, this even worked.

I feel badly for what allegedly happened in KCMO and Tampa, because it’s a lose-lose situation. At the same time, I’m disinclined to support some policy that keeps officers from making valid arrests when the arrestee comes up with a good story. One of the reasons that most people take care of little things before they become big things is that they don’t want to be looking over their shoulders for the cop, or the repo man, or the IRS. It’s real inconvenient to go to the mall and find an empty space where your car used to be, or to see your business padlocked with the office equipment in the back of a federal moving truck. Ignoring these things also limits your ability to cope with the stuff that no one can see coming, like having a miscarriage or being a rape victim. But we are living in an era of non-accountability, where being a victim is fashionable, it’s always someone else’s fault, and getting out of it is a much better option than not getting into it in the first place. If Ralph Waldo Emerson wasn’t already dead, this would have killed him.