Puerto Rican. This is simply an explosion of frustration from otherwise professional cops who are fed up with the pursuit of Mission Impossible. As one team member put it, “We beat people without prejudice. We hate everybody equally.”

The truth is, this time they didn’t beat anybody. They just messed with a few heads for a little while. Finally, with a last needling insult and a couple of ominous threats about “next time,” they tell the 15-year-old to take off. In an eyeblink the kid is into his shoes and on his feet. His friends are long gone now, out of sight. He heads west on Foster without glancing back and disappears into the night. With chilling insight, the cop at the wheel of one of the squad cars leans to the reporter in the back seat. “So what do you think the long-term sociological implications of this shit will be?”

  The last time this country got a vivid reminder of why we have the Fourth Amendment was twenty years ago when Richard Nixon and his associates decided to use the awesome power of the White House to get even with a handful of people they didn’t like. They rifled confidential medical files digging up dirt for a smear campaign, they bugged phones and offices, invaded private lives, and launched campaigns of fear and intimidation under color of authority. It was, in fact, a textbook example of the very thing Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues were thinking about when they wrote these unequivocal words two hundred years earlier: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause...”^[12]

President Nixon learned, to his utter astonishment, that on those rare occasions when the American people are willing to invoke the absolute terms of their amazing charter, the results are swift and terrible indeed. One television image summarized the collision in the late summer of 1973 as the wave of evidence began to crest against the President. Sam Ervin, the jowly,