By Slade Douglas
Guest Columnist
What happened to me can happen to anyone who challenges the system.
I was swatted by the Veterans Administration for my advocacy for veterans. They had Los Angeles police officers come to my house, arrest me after I asked them to leave and then taken to a hospital against my will to protect the city and officers from liability.
LAPD officers told medical personnel they needed to find something in my system to justify the arrest, and I was drugged, tortured and subjected to body cavity searches in an effort to fabricate evidence and cover up a retaliatory arrest. When no drugs were found in my system, I was released after seven hours.
I ended up suing the city and winning a $6.8 million judgment in a federal court jury trial.
Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong recognized an important distinction in Slade Douglas v. City of Los Angeles et al., stating: “The purpose of a welfare check is for the benefit of the individual at issue, not because they are under suspicion of any crime.”
That distinction raises a broader public-policy question: if a person is not under suspicion of a crime, then what justifies reducing constitutional safeguards rather than strengthening them?
History has repeatedly shown that liberty rarely disappears all at once. More often, it is narrowed through categories, redefined through language, and justified as necessity.
The warning raised here is not that welfare checks, or 5150 mental-health holds, are identical to historical systems of exclusion. The warning is about structure.
Every era creates its own vocabulary of authority. The question is whether administrative labels can begin functioning as constitutional exceptions, creating situations where citizens receive fewer practical protections, not because they committed a crime, but because they were classified differently.
If constitutional protections become dependent upon labels rather than evidence, then equal liberty becomes conditional.
The issue is not whether mental-health emergencies exist. The issue is not whether intervention can ever be necessary. The issue is whether constitutional limits disappear once government changes the label attached to detention.
The normalization of welfare checks and 5150 mental-health holds risks transforming what should remain consensual encounters into coercive state action through terminology rather than evidence. That is why labeling a retaliatory law-enforcement action as a “welfare check” constitutes semantic fraud and deprivation of due process.
When officers can claim authority to detain a citizen without evidence and for invoking constitutional rights, the welfare-check label ceases to function as a safeguard and becomes a mechanism of systemic abuse.
A welfare check is based on a legitimate concern for a person’s safety or well-being. When false emergency narratives are used to trigger law-enforcement intervention against a citizen who committed no crime, the distinction between a welfare check and a form of institutionalized swatting becomes increasingly difficult to ignore.
Swatting, in its most basic form, involves the use of a false emergency report to weaponize law enforcement against a targeted individual by provoking an armed emergency response, exposing the target to the risk of detention, injury, or worse.
The government uses labels as if they were magic words that nullify the Constitution.
If an accusation of criminal conduct requires evidence before treating the accusation as fact, why should labels such as “welfare check” and “5150 mental health hold” be accepted without it?
That’s how they divide the public, not by law but by label, into two classes: those who are protected by the Constitution, and those who are managed outside of it.
When a false mental-health narrative is invoked to justify the seizure, government compounds the constitutional violation with defamation under color of law, branding an innocent veteran as mentally ill and dangerous to conceal its own misconduct.
The result is an inversion of constitutional protection.
A criminal defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty and receives counsel, process and judicial oversight. Yet, under a welfare-check or 5150 mental-health hold framework, a citizen accused of no crime may become subject to confinement, transport, intervention, stigmatization and deprivation of liberty without receiving equivalent procedural protection.
How did we arrive at a place where a law-abiding citizen can, in practice, receive fewer safeguards than an accused offender? Because if we allow those labels to replace legal standards, we invite a system where rights don’t depend on law, they depend on government discretion. And that’s not justice. That’s how the Constitution gets erased without ever being amended.
Government cannot create through policy what constitutional limits prohibit. No label should authorize what the Constitution forbids. Constitutional rights cannot become conditional because government changes the name of the encounter.
Slade Douglas is a U.S. Army veteran who was awarded $6.8 million by a federal jury against the LAPD and the city of Los Angeles.
LIFTOUT
The issue is whether constitutional limits disappear once government changes the label attached to detention.
