Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs From: [catalyst remailer] at [netcom.com] Subject: Police State Passed Into Law. Date: Sat, 23 Apr 1994 13:59:09 -0700 Look what we are doing. Zowie. Metal detectors in people's homes. Knocks on your door at 4AM, or worse. Good God, save us. WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Senate agrees with a Clinton administration plan to conduct warrantless searches for illegal guns and drugs in public housing projects. Such searches, known as sweeps, were declared unconstitutional two weeks ago by a federal judge in Chicago who said they violated tenants' Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure. On Saturday, President Clinton announced a new plan to make housing projects safer, which includes encouraging tenants to sign leases consenting in advance to surprise weapons searches, much as a standard lease allows maintenance inspections. The new policy permits sweeps in common areas such as lobbies and in vacant apartments, as well as apartments where people have given permission, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros said Friday on NBC. Cisneros said that people who do not give their permission would not be denied public housing, but noted that in Chicago, ``most people are consenting because they want their buildings to be clean.'' The Constitution provides the right to be protected from searches but, Cisneros added, ``people have a right to be safe, to see their children go to school safely. ...'' A non-binding resolution, offered by Senate Republican leader Bob Dole of Kansas and adopted by voice vote Thursday, endorsed the policy. A condition, proposed by Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., was added saying tenants couldn't be denied housing for refusing to agree to a search clause in their lease. However, Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, warned that even that might be rejected on constitutional grounds because any waiver of constitutional rights must be freely given. ``It is not beyond possibility that ... the federal courts of this nation will in fact conclude that a lease for public housing is not a contract freely entered into by equal partners. They are contracts, say the critics, imposed by the state on a person who has no real alternative,'' he said. In addition to the searches, the administration initiative also would authorize public housing officials to erect fences around buildings, install metal detectors at entrances, issue identity cards to tenants and frisk those coming into buildings and search their packages. Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun, D-Ill., said the administration policy may make some tenants feel safer but does little to attack the underlying causes of violence. ```It tries to put a Band-Aid on a bad situation, on a cancer that's not going to be cured by taking away the dignity of people who are poor and live in public housing,'' she said.