New York, Feb. 7—The Senate has passed, at the urging of Mr. Nixon, a complicated anti-crime bill which is left now for the House of Representatives to pass or to reject. The pressures are considerable on the House to refuse to go along, and these pressures come in not only from liberal gentlemen, but also—in some cases—from conservatives. The omnibus bill requires a great deal of analysis but one feature of it emerges as the gravamen of the opposition. It is the clause that specifies that under certain circumstances policemen bent on catching narcotics wholesalers with the goods may open the door without knocking.
The argument of the opposition is as follows. If you permit policemen to enter a house or an apartment without knocking, you have gravely diminished the right of privacy which, whatever is still left of it, derives from the ancient axiom that one’s home is one’s castle. Permit the police to break down your door and flood into your livingroom, and you permit police to intrude on— conceivably the most intimate moments of one’s life. Moreover, if you will permit the police to do what the proposed law would permit them to do in search of heroin, what will the government, in the days ahead, invoke so dangerous a precedent in behalf of? The search of husbands who have deserted their wives? Of wives who have failed to pay their traffic summons for double parking?
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