Reno 911 strikes again

We all had a good laugh a couple of days ago with the story of the undercover police selling drugs to the undercover Sheriff’s deputy in Statesville, NC.
Well, here’s another one that looks like it came right from the files of Reno 911, this time from El Paso, Texas.

The sheriff of Hudspeth County illegally detained a group of El Paso officers on a drug stakeout, then laughed as he told them that their operation was blown and they were free to leave, a lawsuit against the sheriff alleges.

It’s pretty confusing, but this is what I gather from the allegations in the lawsuit…
The El Paso officers, who believed they were deputized by the DA to work narcotics in Hudspeth County as well as El Paso, got word of a possible drug shipment and set up a stakeout in Hudspeth County. Since the Hudspeth County sheriff doesn’t come in that early in the morning, they couldn’t notify him they were working his turf. They pulled over a car (the wrong one) and a Hudspeth County deputy saw them and asked them what they hell they thought they were doing.
So they go back to their stakeout, get word that the Sheriff is trying to arrest them, decide to head back to El Paso, but get stopped in a Sheriff’s roadblock. The Sheriff hauls them in and says they’d better let him know next time they work his turf, and then:

“He concluded his presentation by announcing with a laugh: ‘Whatever you were working on is f—-d up now, and you’re free to leave.’ “

So the El Paso narcotics officer is suing as a private citizen for, get this, a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights:

His lawyer, Wyatt, said that “The Fourth Amendment protects everybody from being arrested without probable cause. In this instance there was no probable cause that anybody had committed a crime yet the sheriff of Hudspeth County ordered that several El Paso police officers be arrested and detained.”

Yeah, life’s a bitch when you don’t have Fourth Amendment rights, isn’t it, Officer Dangle Short? When police can just pull you over and put you through hoops just because they don’t like you, or they have a hunch you’re doing something you shouldn’t be…