Restoring the Fourth Amendment: How We, the People, Can Win Over Washington

by Shahid Buttar

Despite promises of change, the Obama administration has proven either unwilling — or unable — to shift the national security paradigm. Nearly halfway through the administration’s term, the battle to banish the Bush administration’s policy legacy remains largely unfought, let alone won.

But this is no time for progressive activists to throw in the political towel. While “change you can believe in” may have been a premature promise from our president, grassroots populists enjoy ample opportunities to shift the landscape in D.C., especially if we unite around constitutional concerns shared across the political spectrum.

Whether concerned by government spying, or the guilt by association apparent in profiling Latinos, African Americans, and Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians for various so-called “signature crimes,” limits on local law enforcement authorities offer the potential to galvanize solidarity among communities of color. Measures restricting domestic intelligence operations can also attract the support of libertarians — including some elements of the Tea Party — disaffected by the Washington consensus favoring expanding executive power.

Ethnic profiling impacts not just a single vulnerable community, but all of them. At the federal level, different agencies pursuing distinct agencies marginalize different ethnic groups: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) prey on Latinos in the war on immigrants; CBP and the FBI target Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians in the war on terror; and the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration marginalize African Americans and Latinos in the war on drugs. But at the local level, the various forms of profiling all appear in the activities of local police departments.

Because state and local police are increasingly involved in federal initiatives related to immigration or intelligence collection — both of which have caused rampant profiling — communities across the spectrum of colors share aligned interests in imposing enforceable local legislative limits on police.

Setting aside profiling, privacy issues concern Libertarians and Tea Party supporters at least as much as progressives. Those political forces are ripe for outreach by civil rights advocates seeking limits on local law enforcement authorities.

Campaigns seeking privacy from dragnet surveillance alongside limits to stop ethnic profiling offers common cause for progressives and libertarians — and daylight to push back on the national inertia eviscerating the Constitution. By combining these seemingly disparate elements in their grassroots campaigns, local organizers can build broad coalitions — across not only African American, Latino, Muslim, Arab and South Asian communities, but also with libertarian allies who share concerns about the erosion of the Fourth Amendment.

For instance, proposed reforms developed by the Bill of Rights Defense Committee create enforceable protections to stop and prevent future racial profiling as it impacts each of the several communities vulnerable to law enforcement excesses — while also limiting domestic intelligence collection (local spying) activities to require individualized suspicion of criminality.

With 2010 finding our government institutions tone deaf and disengaged from addressing our mounting constitutional crises, there have been few riper times for a trans-partisan political offensive. And while D.C. may lay beyond the reach of frustrated activists still waiting for “change we can believe in,” we can still win campaigns at the local level.

Shahid Buttar is executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. He previously served as counsel to the program to combat racial and religious profiling at Muslim Advocates. An earlier version of this article, which includes links to further data and resources, appears online at Truthout.org.