First, make the reasonable seizures

As noted in this space earlier, Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, who delivered a rousing glibertarian indictment of government incompetence to a gathering of two million "tea party protesters" last month, supports a proposal to begin seizing biological material from inside the personal bodies of innocent citizens.

Only trouble is, reports the Journal-Sentinel's Daniel Bice, Clarke is presiding over a government department of his own, which:

By Clarke's admission, department employees — deputies, corrections officers, and civilians — failed to collect the DNA of at least 350 convicted felons at the correctional facility in Franklin, WI from April to August, a five-month stretch.

And those numbers may be light.

Without question, Sheriff Clarke needs to sort out that situation before he starts lobbying to expand the program to include persons who haven't even been charged with a Class C misdemeanor.

Presumably, those tea party protesters would expect nothing less.

Your correspondent noted at their Veteran's Park jamboree that the revelers gathered within sight of numerous giant mock-ups of the United States Constitution, and several speakers pledged their reverence for the document and the principles articulated therein.

And I'm fairly certain there's some stuff in there to the effect of the inviolate right of the people to be secure in their persons and enjoying certain guarantees against unreasonable seizures.

Convicted felons may indeed have forfeited some of those rights, but the same can't be said for those arrestees who have yet to be even haled into court for a probable cause hearing, let alone charged.