A local Ohio ordinance making it a crime for civilians to display bumper stickers of police organizations is unconstitutional, a federal judge says.
The First Amendment decision by U.S. District Judge Michael Barrett blocks the suburban Village of Lockland from enforcing the minor-misdemeanor statute, and comes after a nationwide scattering of similar decisions overturning ordinances forbidding citizens from wearing police and military garb.
The ordinance in question authorizes police to pull over drivers on suspicion that they were violating the bumper-sticker law, which reads: "No person who is not entitled to do so shall knowingly display on a motor vehicle the emblem of a local law enforcement agency or an organization of law enforcement officers."
The legal challenge was brought by Jasir Singh, a 49-year-old grocery owner in the Village of Lockland, a suburb of Cincinnati. He was wearing a turban while driving a yellow Corvette through town in 2008, when he was pulled over because his bumper displayed a silver-dollar-sized emblem of the Fraternal Order of Police.
"That's harassment when you don't break a traffic law and you get pulled over, and they tell you that the reason is a sticker you're not supposed to have," Singh said in a telephone interview Friday.
He testified that a friend on the Cincinnati Police Department gave him the emblem, which symbolizes a 325,000-member fraternal order that calls itself "the voice of our nation's law enforcement officers."
The FOP, Lockland and the state of Ohio urged Judge Barrett to uphold the law, which carries a $100 fine for first-time offenders. They said the statute was necessary because officers sometimes let down their guard when they pull over vehicles displaying police-related insignia.
"This statute," the judge ruled, "does not further that interest and may actually put police officers in greater harm since it can not be known to the police officer who is actually driving a motor vehicle regardless of who the vehicle is registered to or what emblem is placed on it."
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