There is a piece of entrapment in this, but it is not as bad as what is commonly allowed, as I see it.
For example, if the cops see a car pull a handbrake turn and screech into an illegal U-turn over the median 100 yds after the sign....that’s IMO voluntary VERY suspicious behavior.
We see cops placing ads in newspaper with lists of the names of wanted felons (or fugitives or arrest warrants) as lottery winners...and such spoofs inevitably results in some very low cost arrests. And....we laugh at those, do we not? How is this different than such a spoof? [answering my own question] Existing warrants are existing, this is “fishing”.
I’m not defending nor attacking here, just discussing.
There’s no question that the suspicious behavior that will become the stop & request to search premise is cop-induced. I guess for me, the piece of criticality is how the searches are conducted. If they are conducted under duress, then that’s already illegal (not that it isn’t done)
And Tennessee and some Southern State cops are fanatical about seizing any amounts of cash they find over pocket money amounts.
It just feels to me that law enforcement has the wrong priorities a lot of the time if the goal is actual public safety. Just how many unsolved murders are there in the state of Ohio, for example?
The Uniform Crime Report from the FBI in 2011 says Ohio reported 513 criminal (non-justified) homicides. And we know in America that less than 2/3rds of murders are ever solved. So every single year, Ohio accumulates another 175 or so unsolved slayings. I don’t mean to pick on Ohio; it’s the same in other states.
You’d think that getting MURDERERS off the streets would be a high priority, but in practice, it takes a backseat to all kinds of other revenue enforcement nonsense. The focus here in Ohio seems inappropriate when there are much more pressing concerns, like several THOUSAND unsolved killings over the past couple decades.
Sure, maybe one of these checkpoints will catch a murder suspect by accident, but that’s a slender reed at best.