Officer.com Police Blogs & Podcasts

Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

Last week saw a health scare for some air travelers when they learned that a man with an especially virulent strain of tuberculosis had been on a commercial flight with them. That was the primary concern for those people, but the news story focused more on how Andrew Speaker managed to get across a Canadian-U.S. border despite being entered on a watch list from the Centers for Disease Control. Worse yet, the alert came up on the display being used by the Customs & Border Protection (CBP) officer at the checkpoint, and he admitted Speaker, anyway.

This faux pas got national attention not so much because of the public health threat, but because it was so easy to bypass a warning system that was apparently working as it was expected to. Why did this happen? It happened because the CBP officer resorted to a supposedly superior screening method that he has been urged to use many times, as have we all.

That screening method is what many people call “common sense.” It is anything but common, and often doesn’t make sense. Common sense is usually considered a method that any of us could use to resolve a problem, and which would likely lead to the same solution, no matter who was using it. When Thomas Paine used that term as the title of his 1776 essay demanding independence from the British crown, there was a lot more foundation for common sense. Most everyone in a community had their ethnicity, religion, economic class, and even occupation (nearly everyone was a farmer, full time or part time) in common. While there were differences of opinion, the basis of reasoning was more or less the same for everyone.

Today’s America is far too diverse for that. There is no reason to expect that next-door neighbors have anything in common. By the time you get to an airport or other travel hub, you’ll be fortunate to find someone with whom you share an interest. That wouldn’t be a bad thing if we were mature enough as a society to deal with it properly, with tolerance and respect, but we’ve got a long way to go in that area. The problem in this instance is that what is the obvious and reasonable course of action to take for one person is completely foreign to another. This is why we have established rules, policies, and laws.

On paper, you’ll always be okay if you “go by the book.” In real life, you will be scorned and ridiculed, viewed as a robot with no ability to think. Your bank can lawfully foreclose on your house if you are one day late with the mortgage payment (and sadly, some of the more predatory lenders do exactly that). But most of us would be horrified if we were treated that way. City ordinances probably require that your dog be restrained or confined at all times. But if you were playing fetch with the dog in your unfenced front yard, you would be outraged to get a ticket for “dog at large.” You would be on the phone to the issuing officer’s supervisor before he made it back to his car.

Even worse, we constantly beg people who are charged with following the rules to not follow them. Cops are especially prone to this, because many cops don’t think the rules should apply to them, and, besides, we have a connection with the people who are supposed to enforce them. When the stadium parking lot is full, flash the badge at the cop standing post there and ask him if you can park in front of that gate that no one uses, anyway. He’ll probably let you, even though the gate is intended to allow fire engines and other emergency vehicles into the stadium in the rare event they are needed. They probably won’t be. Probably.

Sometimes the gatekeeper even looks for an excuse not to follow the rules. When I was in DC recently, I visited a few buildings that had security checkpoints and metal detectors. I wasn’t carrying a gun, but I did have some other items that most people wouldn’t be allowed to take past the checkpoint. I was ready to find someplace to store them, but in every case the guard asked me if I was law enforcement, asked to see my retired officer ID, and then waved me through. Maybe that’s official policy in some places, but I’m betting that it’s often not.

In the border crossing incident, the CBP officer saw the warning, decided that Speaker didn’t look sick to him, and waved him through. He was trying to be a nice, reasonable guy. He’s now been moved off the checkpoint to “administrative duties.” That’s the PC term for police purgatory. The officer did what every one of us has done many times — he tried to use his “common sense” to decide whether a rule should apply or not. If he ever makes it back to regular duty, I wouldn’t expect that he’ll be cutting people much slack.

I also hasten to point out that this could have turned out much worse than it did. At this writing, it doesn’t look as though Speaker managed to infect anyone, but then he wasn’t trying to. He just didn’t think he should be restricted from commercial or international travel just because he had a highly contagious and drug-resistant disease. But what if Speaker had been a genuine terrorist infected with bird flu, Ebola, or smallpox — something highly contagious, often lethal, and difficult to treat (well, kind of like tuberculosis)? What if al-Qaeda decided that their next band of martyrs was going to carry biological weapons instead of explosives? Infect the jihadis right before they traveled so that they wouldn’t yet show symptoms, put them on several airplanes so that the germs would get distributed through the closed cabin, get them across the border, and then have them touch, sneeze on, bleed on and generally spread the bug as widely as they could? Does this sound to you like a nightmare scenario?

We’ve all asked someone to cut us a break at one time or another, to bend the rules a little because those rules weren’t really intended for us, or for this situation. As cops, we’ve done the bending. Most of the time, no one notices and everything works out okay. In these times, though, there is often a lot more at stake. While none of us wants to be known as a regimented automaton with no capacity for reasoning, we usually don’t know the big picture, either. If you ask for the break, or you decide to give one, you’re rolling the dice. As Dirty Harry said, “Do you feel lucky?”