In this country and state, the courts decided how our rights against illegal search and seizure are applied to many different situations, including being stopped in a boat by a marine patrol. You may be willing to give up those rights for a extra safety but a lot of people are not.
I hope the MP did everything by the book. From what I've learned from Skip, that means they must have articulatable suspicion before stopping. Now you might say that having a checkpoint is worth it if just one life is saved. But if the checkpoint turns out to be illegal then all the evidence found is gone. So all the people that could be fined or jailed could go free.
I'm all for the MP making visible presence and stopping even small infractions to check for drunks. I just don't want overzealous people to make illegal stops. That doesn't do anyone any good. It violates our rights and risks letting guilty people go free.
|