Private and public property
A supreme court ruling in Canada has stoked the population, at least in Ontario. The case was about random high school locker searches by police. The court ruled such searches unconstitutional. The big defense of the court’s decision is that people have the right to privacy. Privacy advocates applauded the ruling, many touting that the statement:
“If you’re innocent you have nothing to hide”
is wrong and irrational.
What that quote has to do with this case I don’t know. In my opinion it’s a classic fallacy of argumentation known as the “red herring.” I don’t disagree with the right to be free from police intrusion. In fact as I’ve mentioned before I dislike police very much. However, they do have their use and they do fulfill a function. More importantly, and the crux of the matter is that this argument is not about police intrusion into a private life; it is about property.
The high schools in Ontario, Canada are publicly funded. This means that students are using public property and police have the right to do searches. Students don’t buy the locker, they don’t pay for locker use or privacy at the start of the school year, there is no contract granting them privacy rights to a locker. High school lockers are not like storage lockers. High school lockers are not like an automobile. High school lockers are not like a person. High school lockers are paid for by tax dollars (mine included) and they are public space used by an individual.
Now of course I don’t think police have the right to rough anything up in a locker, they don’t have the right to take or destroy anything except that which is illegal. If students want to keep things private, leave them at home. I’m amazed at how the public debate on this issue continues on the grounds of privacy and private property. High school lockers are not private property. I liken this to employment rules. Some employers give out lockers and the like. However, in the contract (more often than not I’m sure though I don’t have numbers) it’ll state that lockers can be subject to searches; work PCs can be subject to monitoring and restriction. Why are schools different? Especially when drugs/weapons problems are rampant?
I always considered my high school locker as public property. I never used drugs of any sort, but I also never kept anything in my locker. I always stashed things in my bag because I felt my locker was not really mine, and it wasn’t.
Disclaimer: I haven’t read the ruling of course, it’s long (look here if you don’t believe me). So I may be entirely wrong, if that be the case, you may disregard this post. I attempt not to post on issues of possible factual refutation unless I’m certain of the facts, which in this case, I am not.
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Regarding the second issue of the case/article: bus stop searches. I believe those to be unconstitutional.
May 3rd, 2008 at 11:07 pm
This is scary in Canadian schools. With the shooting and bad students that I remember going to school with, giving them this kind of power can only have poor consequences in the future.
If there’s one thing I respect about Japan, is that the students are well behaved, rarely disregard the rules, and no one steals anything. In Canada it’s quite the opposite. The Japanese don’t have lockers though, so this wouldn’t apply to them. Although, if it came to a search, the Japanese teachers have absolute power and can search anything they like. The parents can’t even tell them what do during class time. I’ve never seen the power abused though.
May 16th, 2008 at 6:14 am
I think your logic is somewhat amiss here. The lockers may be pubic property, however, the student’s possessions are not. You’re probably right not to think of the locker as not being like an automobile, but — to steal your analogy — think about the kid’s backpack as the automobile and the locker as the public parking lot. Can the police search your car without a warrant just because it’s in public? No. Never– absolutely not. Should teachers– not even police officers– be able to disregard another person’s private property in this way? If teachers have some reason to suspect the student of illegal activity, they should inform the police. If not, they have no more right to go through their personal belongings on campus than their do to giving students cavity searches.
By the way, just since we haven’t been introduced at all, I’m an old classmate’s of Adam and currently work at a high school and a police academy in Japan, so I have a bit of a vested interest in these issues.
May 16th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Hey Michael, glad you dropped in.
A large part of my understanding of this issue is funding. Anything privately purchased and funded is private; anything publicly funded is public.
If we continue with the parked car analogy, I believe police have the right to search around your car in a parking space but not in your car. However, if they find blood dripping from the trunk… well I think that’s cause for a search. Should the police have been searching the parking spot around the car? I can’t answer that, but it’s public space so they have every right to do so.
Further then, I believe that a locker is public space, or more in the public domain than not and therefore can be searched. I don’t believe police have the right to go into a knapsack in a locker. However, if they’ve got the locker open and a sniffer dog discovers “something”, from that point onwards the police have reasonable cause to search the bag too. Not dissimilar from the situation of the car in the parking space with the blood dripping from it.
It’s splitting fine hairs on a definition but to me it’s very big. I don’t believe a student has a right to privacy in a publicly funded space, clearly you (and the Supreme Court of Canada
) think otherwise. I don’t know if you’ve read the conclusions of the court case but that’s where the issue centres and that’s where we disagree it seems.
If I may quote the judge’s words “The pivotal question in this appeal is whether A.M. had a reasonable expectation of privacy in respect of odours imperceptible to humans that emanated from his unattended backpack in a school gymnasium.”
(Additionally, I’d like to point out that this case was not strictly about locker searches. I didn’t know this at the time and I had considered writing an addendum but decided against it. Here’s the initiating incident of the case that I discovered only later: “In the gymnasium, where there were no students, the dog indicated to his handler that he smelled drugs in a backpack lying with others next to the wall.” So my initial argument about the locker is moot because the lockers were searched after this bag was discovered.)
Anyway, thanks for posting
. Please keep on doing so.
One more thing, I think the issue of body searches are a very sticky subject as well. I haven’t found a conclusion that I’m satisfied with in my own mental wanderings on that topic.