ABSTRACT
In the early 1980s, the self-described “Cuban Cop,” Sheriff Nick Navarro, who worked with Al Pacino for his role in Scarface and was featured in the first reality police show–Cops–adapted Markonni’s “profile” to target long-distance bus and train passengers. Navarro, who once used his crime labs to manufacture crack cocaine and then sell it on the streets in reverse-sting operations, had his men begin barging into locked sleeping compartments on trains and conducting bus sweeps, searching as many passengers “as time permits.” Lower court judges overwhelmingly rejected these tactics; the Florida Supreme Court even compared them to apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany. When one of Navarro’s men woke up a sleeping bus passenger to search his luggage, the state’s highest court ruled such bus sweeps to be per se unconstitutional in order to stop the program. Yet, when Florida v. Bostick reached the Supreme Court, the outcome was entirely predictable. If, as Mendenhall had already held, the police can strip-search a woman without probable cause, random searches of luggage must also be permissible. Bostick is notable less for the ruling of the United States Supreme Court and more for the quandary placed upon the Florida Supreme Court after the case was remanded for “reconsideration.” That court, after having invoked apartheid South Africa in its first ruling, later upheld Bostick’s conviction upon remand. Although judges across the nation had been condemning racial profiling programs for over a decade, all eventually reversed course. The moral dilemma confronting these judges was similar to what the volunteers in Stanley Milgram’s infamous obedience experiments confronted. Seeking to understand the Holocaust, Milgram once tested how people would react when told by an authority figure to apply electric shocks to another individual. These compliant judges, rather than “just following orders,” were just following precedent.
