That’s the headline on the Washington Post story: Local Police Want Right to Jam Wireless Signals.

There’s no good paragraph to excerpt in the story; the lead is about the Obamacade in the inaugural parade. A better lead would have been more clearly about the authority the feds apparently have to jam cell phone signals in certain situations.

Paragraph #2:

It is an increasingly common technology, with federal agencies expanding its use as state and local agencies are pushing for permission to do the same. Police and others say it could stop terrorists from coordinating during an attack, prevent suspects from erasing evidence on wireless devices, simplify arrests and keep inmates from using contraband phones.

I’m sure that this would be a useful item in the cop toolbox. But how many people think that the police wouldn’t abuse this power? The current cop mindset in the United States is one that leads to things like the Prince George’s County (MD) police storming the house of the mayor of a town in the county, killing his two dogs, and restraining him and his mother-in-law on the floor for hours because someone had anonymously sent a box of marijuana to his address — a box that was actually delivered by the police themselves?

The police wound up breaking down the door, shooting the dogs, etc. because, as they constantly claim, there might be a threat to their safety otherwise. ‘You never know what you’re going to find’ when serving a warrant, police spokesmen say again and again in justifying this kind of thing.

Maybe the reason they don’t know in advance what they’re going to find is that they’re not interested in finding out. From a recent Washington Post magazine story about the raid:

“The guy in there is crazy,” [Berwyn Heights, MD police officer] Johnson remembered a Prince George’s County officer telling him when he arrived. “He says he is the mayor of Berwyn Heights.”

“That is the mayor of Berwyn Heights,” Johnson replied.

Police work, ladies and gentlemen! You’d think, since the police spokesmen talk so much about the uncertainty and risk and so on that necessitates these home invasions, that they police would at least make the slightest attempt to figure out ahead of time what they’re going to be up against, no?

Apparently: no. The investigative work in this case, at least, didn’t even extend to having the slightest idea who their target was. Presumably they checked to see whether anyone living at the address had a criminal record, but I wouldn’t even be too sure of that.

There are 27 towns and municipalities in Prince George’s County, and the police in this case were so unfamiliar with the ‘community’ that they constantly talk about that they didn’t know that the guy was the mayor of the very municipality they were operating in.

Do you really think that a group of people so detail-oriented and respectful of civil authority would scruple to not just eventually jam all cell phone communications anywhere within, say, a 200-foot radius of every police car?

They wouldn’t do this at first, of course. But after they’d had jammers for a few years for use by SWAT teams and so on, they’d claim that the use of phones by people in cars during traffic stops represented some kind of threat, and they’d hook jammers up in all their cars. Cops would wear little portable jammers on their belts for those rare cases when they’re forced to venture more than 200 feet from their cars.

It’s worth noting that Brett Darrow’s 2007 recording of a St. George, MO police officer threatening to arrest him on phony charges was made by a camera that continuously uploaded its take. It’s a reasonable assumption that locally stored recordings of disputes between citizens and cops would generally be found to be corrupted, erased, or otherwise gone — just as the video cameras in police cars seem to malfunction at an astonishing rate, most often when there are suggestions that the recordings would tend to make the cops look bad.

In the District, corrections officials won permission from the FCC for a brief test of jamming technology at the D.C. jail last month, after citing the “alarming rate” of contraband phones being seized at prisons around the country.

“Cell phones are used by inmates to engage in highly pernicious behavior such as the intimidation of witnesses, coordination of escapes, and the conducting of criminal enterprises,” D.C. corrections chief Devon Brown wrote to the federal agency.

My main point isn’t about law-enforcement incompetence, but note that one of the needs they cite for this disruptive power is entirely the result of their own incompetence at keeping phones out of prisons. Either visitors are bringing them in, or their own guards are corrupt. Fixing either of those problems would be difficult, though: easier to just jam cell phones in the vicinity of the jail. That ordinary people would be inconvenienced by this isn’t important — they are mere citizens, after all.

The stated justification for all of this, of course, is movie-plot terrorism threats.

“When lives are at stake, law enforcement needs to find ways to disrupt cellphones and other communications in a pinpointed way against terrorists who are using them,” New York City Police Commissioner Raymond F. Kelly told a Senate panel Jan. 8. He also cited the Mumbai terrorist attacks, when hostage-takers used media spotters and satellite and mobile phones to help them outmaneuver police at hotels, train stations and other targets.

This, of course, ignores entirely the fact that much of the Mumbai carnage was the direct result of police incompetence. Witnesses to an early shooting at a railway station said that armed police there didn’t shoot at the terrorists.

It also ignores entirely the fact that if the police are known to jam cell phones, terrorists simply won’t depend on cell phones. They’ll use some other kind of radio that the police aren’t equipped to jam.

This would be an inconvenience for the terrorists — and I’m all for inconveniencing terrorists — but the police jamming would be an even greater ‘inconvenience’ for a citizen who might see something in the vicinity of an attack that might be useful to the police — but only if the citizen could call 911 on his cell phone.