White House Hired Private Firm To Take Unconstitutional Cheek Swabs At Unconstitutional Checkpoint

[Prison Planet] A supposedly “voluntary” survey checkpoint run by a private firm in Reading, Pennsylvania on behalf of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy caused outrage when residents said they were forced off the road into a car park and coerced into giving cheek swabs as a result of an intimidating police presence.

The Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation was hired by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to run the checkpoint, during which motorists were quizzed about their driving habits.

Reading resident Ricardo Nieves said that he had to repeatedly refuse to take part in the survey over a 5 minute period before the was allowed to leave. Nieves noted that the presence of city police and a police car with flashing lights was designed to “intimidate motorists” into submission and “gave the checkpoint an air of authority it would not otherwise have had,” according to the Reading Eagle.

Nieves told the City Council Monday that the company’s hiring of police officers to help run the checkpoint was “a gross abuse of power on many levels” and that the firm running it refused to divulge why they were demanding to take swabs of people’s cheeks, with Nieves asserting, “Clearly it was for DNA.”

City Police Chief William M. Heim later remarked that the cheek swabs were to test for the presence of prescription drugs, dismissing Nieves’ assertion that the police presence was coercive by claiming, “People are not pressured by police presence to do something they don’t want to.”

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