Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 18.pdf/311

 THE GREEN BAG legitimate businesses as the owners desire. And as is so often charged, it is no doubt true that the inspections prescribed by statute and by municipal ordinances are so numerous that in many instances they are a burden even to the conscientious and law abiding. They, too, as a rule are enforced by ignorant officials.1 Most of us would perhaps agree with the statement made by the Supreme Court of Iowa, that "no search warrant is unreasonable in the legal sense when it is for a thing obnoxious to the law and of a person and place particularly de scribed and is issued on oath of probable cause,"2 when such warrants are issued for the seizure of liqtior illegally kept, or of contraband articles, but when they are directed for the furtherance of laws which regulate the conduct of our own private businesses which we have before deemed to have been our own concern and our own concern alone, and to detect illegal practices rather than to destroy illegal things, many of us demur. We at any rate insist that there shall be no irresponsible bureaucra cies and that the entrances shall not be made at random or unreasonably, nor shall we be at all times subject to the duty of sub mitting to examinations. In all cases, therefore, a strict color of law should be pres ent and the limitations of the right should be clearly defined. The searches and in vestigations should be reasonable; they should be reasonable though by that very reasonableness numerous violations of the laws would remain undetected. Even a slight acquaintance with the his tory of the administration, or rather mal administration, of the law in our large cities will show that the most anarchistic and lawless of all Americans are the American police and in a large measure the American police justices; that is to say, if the overrid ing of the established rules of -law constitutes 1 See quotation from Judge Cooley in note 29, ante.
 * See opinion Santo v. State, 2 la. 165.

anarchy. Especially is this the case in the foreign quarters of our cities where the de fendants are unable to use the English language and are unacquainted with the rights which the English law has given to them, and are usually too poor to employ competent counsel. Our police too often enter and seize and arbitrarily arrest and apply the sweatbox system merely because the offender has no public sentiment behind him. In doing so, however, they endanger all respect for the law. There is, indeed, no doubt in the mind of the writer that the anarchy of the Ilaymarket riot in Chicago was the indirect if not the direct result of a long period of anarchy on the part of the Chicago police and Chicago police justices which led to a wide-spread disrespect for the law and for its officers. Even if the right to enter for the. purpose of obtaining evidence and to prevent the commission of offenses, and to see that the laws are enforced must be conceded in order to protect the public under our complicated industrial system, let us at any rate have some due process of law. The writer himself has often viewed the spasms of police activity which have taken place in Chicago with a feeling of fear rather than of satisfac tion. In the place of a steady and per sistent enforcement of the law, without fear and without favor, there has for many years been in that city an open toleration of, if not connivance with, the lawbreaker, or at any rate with so many lawbreakers or classes of lawbreakers that other classes have come to the conclusion that there is no intention to enforce any law. When ever public attention, however, has been called to any evil, the police have felt it incumbent upon them to make a show of diligence by wholesale arrests, often with out warrants or evidence or authority, and by breaking and entering places without evidence which they themselves have toler ated with evidence and often patronized for many years. In all these matters they have too often gone beyond the law and the