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Episode 153: Thin Blue Lies: How Pretextual Stops Undermine Police Legitimacy (with Jonathan Blanks)

1,011 views · Published 23 September 2016 · 48:48 · Indexed 18 October 2026

Channel: Libertarianism.org · 2016 · News & Politics

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What’s a pretextual police stop? When do police need your consent to a search, and are these searches unconstitutional? Is there a war on cops?

Jonathan Blanks joins us this week to share his findings on how police searches disproportionately affect minorities.

Show Notes and Further Reading

Jonathan Blanks’s “Thin Blue Lies: How Pretextual Stops Undermine Police Legitimacy” appears in Volume 66, Issue 4 of the Case Western Reserve Law Review.
http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/articles/blanks-cwrlr-v66n4.pdf

Here’s a previous Free Thoughts episode with Blanks on police misconduct.
http://www.libertarianism.org/media/free-thoughts/problem-police-misconduct

Listeners may also be interested in this Free Thoughts episode with Adam Bates and Matthew Feeney on how new technologies are changing law enforcement.
http://www.libertarianism.org/media/free-thoughts/how-new-technology-is-changing-law-enforcement

Blanks mentions this article by George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson in the March 1982 issue of The Atlantic, which originated the “broken windows” theory of policing.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/broken-windows/304465/

Aaron mentions watching the 1971 Don Siegel film Dirty Harry, starring Clint Eastwood.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066999/

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