Busted!

If you've ever been stopped and searched by the police, you know
how humiliating it feels to be forced to sit and wait like a
child while strangers with guns tear through your personal
belongings. But that could be just the beginning of your
ordeal. What if the police find a marijuana seed that your
friend accidentally dropped? What if they find a prescription
pill with no prescription? In these cases, waiving one's
constitutional rights can lead to arrest, jail, expensive legal
bills and seized property. Viewing BUSTED can prevent this from
happening to your and your loved ones. So visit
color=#0000ffhttp://stopthedrugwar.org/donate/ and donate $35 or more, and
DRCNet will send you a copy for free!

Produced by the Flex Your Rights Foundation and narrated by
retired ACLU executive director Ira Glasser, BUSTED
realistically depicts the pressure and confusion of common
police encounters. BUSTED's actors illustrate the right and
wrong ways to handle different police encounters, in an
entertaining but revealing way, with special attention focused
on instructing viewers how to courteously and confidently refuse
police search requests. BUSTED is a truly exciting, truly
useful, truly interesting and entertaining production, and you
can be one of the very first people to own a copy -- just visit
color=#0000ffhttp://stopthedrugwar.org/donate/ to donate and order today!

DRCNet Video Review: "BUSTED: The Citizens' Guide to Surviving
Police Encounters"
http://color=#0000ffhttp://stopthedr...edreview.shtml

-- Phillip S. Smith, 11/7/03

Many are familiar with the "bust cards" issued by groups such as
the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Organization
for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. The wallet-sized cards
succinctly inform readers of their constitutional rights in the
event of an encounter with police. "You do not have to talk to
the police without a lawyer present," the cards say, "Do not
consent to any searches." In a nation that saw nearly 700,000
people arrested on marijuana charges alone last year -- the vast
majority of them for simple possession -- providing such
information is a valuable and necessary public service.

But glancing at a bust card and carrying it around in one's
wallet doesn't simulate the high-stakes, adrenaline-charged
atmosphere of a real-life encounter with the police. As any
criminal defense lawyer will tell you, most people are not aware
of their rights, but even those who are typically fail to
exercise them in the face of aggressive, demanding police
officers unready to accept anything except absolute compliance
with their commands. Now, thanks to the Flex Your Rights
Foundation ( color=#0000ffhttp://www.flexyourrights.org), a Washington, DC-
based organization whose raison d'etre is teaching citizens to
assert and protect their rights during police encounters,
everybody has the opportunity to learn their constitutional
rights and to see how to apply them in real-life situations.

Flex Your Rights has just released its instructional video,
"BUSTED: The Citizens' Guide to Surviving Police Encounters,"
and it should be a blockbuster. A combination of civics lesson
and COPS, "BUSTED" boasts the forthright narration of one of the
nation's leading civil libertarians, recently retired long-time
head of the ACLU, Ira Glasser. Glasser's combination of
gravitas and grandfatherly mien lend his narration a credibility
few could match, and his exposition of what the Fourth, Fifth,
and Sixth Amendments mean to people's ability to defend
themselves from unwarranted police intrusions is straightforward
enough that even the kid who missed civics class will be able to
grasp his meaning.

But while Glasser provides the law lessons and narrative
structure, the video's real grabber is the scenes where all-too-
common simple encounters with police spin out of control into
arrest and a slamming jail cell door. The video opens with
three red-eyed, munchie-eating students driving on their way to
a concert. Suddenly, the red lights come on behind. (Kudos due
here to rising starlet Carolyn Lunman, the young woman in the
front seat, who, according to inside sources, upon turning and
seeing the police car behind them, improvised the timeless line,
"Oh, crap.") From then on, it's all downhill, as the hapless
trio repeatedly (and unknowingly) waive their rights until they
end up in handcuffs and jail cells.

And here's where Glasser comes in. He revisits the encounter,
going over every aspect of the interaction between students and
the policeman and showing exactly when and how they managed to
turn a simple speeding ticket into a three-person marijuana
bust. The driver, Darrell, leaves his car door invitingly wide-
open when he exits the car at the cop's command, allowing the
officer to stick his head in, sniff, and note that "it smells
like Bob Marley's ass in here." Then the officer, in typical
fashion, misleads and intimidates the trio into consenting to a
search of their car. "You don't have any dope in here and you
don't mind if I take a look around, do you?" he asks. "No,"
says the unprepared driver. But has he denied having any
contraband or has he consented to a search? The officer's
compound question was a deliberate construction designed to
confuse and trick his prey, and it worked. Then yet again, as
the officer holds up a backpack and asks to look inside, he
alternately cajoles and threatens until the driver yields --
despite being fully aware that he's carrying a baggie of weed --
and seals his own arrest. The young woman, too, admits to
owning the pipe accompanying the baggie, thus sealing her
arrest. The third young man, the most scared and stoned-seeming
("Let him look in the bag, Darrell," Troy shouts out in a panic
after the cop describes how luscious the two students would look
to their cellmates), ends up in cuffs, too, after admitting to
having smoked pot earlier. "Thanks for being honest with me,"
the cop says.

The scenario is all too familiar. It has happened to us, or to
our friends or relatives or classmates. And it has lead to all
sorts of dire consequences: criminal records, lost jobs,
embarrassment, fines, lost student loans, and on and on and on.
But now, Glasser and Flex Your Rights come to the rescue. The
next scene in "BUSTED" is an alternate take, with the driver
fully aware of and exercising his rights. When the red lights
start flashing, Darrell instructs his passengers to stay silent,
then takes command of the situation. "Why did you stop us,
officer?" he begins, immediately throwing off the inquisitional
dynamic favored by police officers. He lowers his window only
enough to converse with the officer -- not enough for him to
stick his head in and sniff around. He doesn't tell the officer
whether they are carrying any contraband. And he calmly and
politely refuses to consent to a search of his vehicle. When
the officer begins the cajoling and the threats, Darrell simply
responds with "Are we free to go?" The visibly angered cop
threatens to call in the drug dogs, goes to his car, returns a
few minutes later, gives Darrell a speeding ticket, and leaves.
"What just happened?" exults Carolyn. "Dude, you the man!"
shouts Troy.

Yeah, Darrell was the man that time. By effectively exercising
his rights, he saved himself and his friends from a very ugly
experience. "BUSTED" does the same thing with two other common
scenarios -- the street stop and the loud party -- first showing
the typical, uneducated and unpracticed responses leading to
arrest and jail, and then contrasting them with educated,
assertive (yet non-confrontational) responses of people prepared
to exercise their rights.

The acting (a mix of professionals and drug policy wonk
amateurs) is good, as are the editing and production values of
director Roger Sorkin, but even if it were B-movie quality
hackwork, "BUSTED" would still be a critically important self-
defense tool, not only for the millions of Americans who violate
the drug laws on a daily basis, but for everyone in the country.
After all, as Flex Your Rights executive director Steve
Silverman will quickly point out, constitutional rights designed
to protect us and our privacy from government intrusion belong
to all of us. It's up to us to know and exercise them, and
"BUSTED" does a great job helping to show us how.

"BUSTED" deserves to be -- needs to be -- seen on every campus
and in every high school across the land. (After all, what is
more of a civics lesson than learning how to exercise your
rights?) It needs to be seen in the communities most at risk as
well: the inner cities and barrios of the country.

BUSTED got rave reviews (no pun intended) at its college premier
in Bozeman, Montana, last month, where 300 students skipped part
of the World Series to check it out, the vast majority of them
sticking out not only the 45-minute video but the question and
discussion session that followed. I personally showed an
informal advance screening of "BUSTED" at an apartment full of
young people in Austin, Texas, last week. They grumbled at
first when I turned off BET, but the complaints rapidly ceased
as these kids were first enthralled by the COPS-style encounter
and then entranced by the idea that they could protect
themselves. One young man who had been arrested after a traffic
stop just days earlier gave perhaps the most impressive and
heart-felt testimonial: "Dude, I wish I'd seen this last week!"

Don't be like that kid. Get a copy of "BUSTED" now
(visiting color=#0000ffhttp://stopthedrugwar.org/donate/ is one good way), and watch it repeatedly. Then show it to anyone you can get to watch.
This is important.

----------------

SOME OF THE ADVANCE PRAISE FOR "BUSTED":

"Our precious constitutional rights are worth only the paper
they are written on unless we understand and exercise them.
BUSTED makes an important contribution toward transforming the
Constitution's paper promises into real rights for real people."
-- Nadine Strossen, president, American Civil Liberties Union

"BUSTED provides effective instruction in how to benefit from
basic constitutional rights. It deserves wide distribution."
-- Milton Friedman, Hoover Institution fellow; Nobel laureate
economist

"As a journalist covering the war on drugs, I've often been
surprised at how readily people consent to searches. By clearly
explaining and vividly illustrating the dynamics of encounters
with the police, BUSTED should help people keep their calm --
and their freedom."
-- Jacob Sullum, senior editor, Reason Magazine; author, "Saying
Yes: In Defense of Drug Use"

"Chronic disregard for civil rights is tearing apart the fabric
of America. Flex Your Rights has hit the nail on the head in
this hard hitting instructional video."
-- Mike Gray, author, "Drug Crazy"; chairman, Common Sense for
Drug Policy

"BUSTED is the only video I know of that is providing clear and
candid information about how to 'just say no' to intimidating
police searches. Parents, teachers, and concerned citizens
across the US should use BUSTED to protect young people, who are
often targeted by police, from the greatest harm of using
marijuana -- arrest."
-- Robert Kampia, executive director, Marijuana Policy Project

"We should not be put in the position of trying to protect
individuals from themselves, because that is when we police
start violating people's constitutional rights."
-- Jack A. Cole, executive director, Law Enforcement Against
Prohibition

"If enough people see BUSTED it will alter the balance of power
on America's streets forever."
-- Nora Callahan, executive director, November Coalition



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