The Police State and the Private, Texas Edition

The latest from our benevolent local overlords:

The first video was graphic enough. Two women, as shown in a Texas state trooper’s dash cam recording, are probed in their vaginas and rectums by a glove-wearing female officer after a routine traffic stop near Dallas.

A few days later, a second video surfaced. It was an eerily similar scenario, but this time the traffic stop was just outside Houston, and with different troopers. Two women, pulled over for allegedly speeding, are subjected to body cavity searches by a female officer summoned to the scene by a male trooper.

Unlike the earlier tape, this one had clear audio. Yells can be heard as the female trooper shoves her gloved finger inside one woman.

In both invasive incidents, the female troopers don’t change gloves between probes, according to the horrified victims.

Texas officials say the searches are unconstitutional. So do attorneys for the shaken women, who have filed federal lawsuits.

[…]

So how did Texas troopers hundreds of miles apart get captured on dash cams conducting body cavity searches under nearly identical conditions?

“The fact that they both happened means there is some sort of (department) policy” advocating their use at traffic stops, Jim Harrington of the Texas Civil Rights Project told the Daily News. “It’s such a prohibited practice. I don’t know why they think they can do this. It’s mind-boggling.”

The next question: do you think the Alito opinion justifying the constitutionality of these searches will be a dissent, or a majority?