Repeat after me: "reasonable articulable suspicion"

Somebody makes the circuit among several Massachusetts Wendy's restaurants, takes notes on identifying characteristics of the hard-working taxpayers behind the counters, then calls the manager at each one. He impersonates a cop, instructing the managers to select one employee against the descriptions he has taken, and strip-search that employee under the suspicion of theft. A Bart Simpson-level prank, two or three evolutionary steps above demanding that Prince Albert be let out of his can.

But the managers actually did it. "Later, however, each manager became suspicious, and reported the call and the incident to local police." To their credit, we presume.

Here's the straw: "The managers who were duped are law-abiding citizens. They thought they were responding to direct orders by the police."

When did a 'direct order by the police' carry any obligation to do anything other than stop long enough for the cop to figure you out? It's bad enough that Dudley Hiibel needed to know the Magic Words ("Am I being detained, Officer?" "Am I free to go?" "What or who are you looking for, Officer?" "I do not consent to any search.") and got the snot kicked out of him because he didn't. He at least had a sense, an unarticulable notion of what a cop's boundaries are, and thought he was well within his own. These restaurant managers hadn't a clue. To say they were 'duped' is far too generous.

So we assert that, henceforth, no American shall consider himself or herself educated without having read and studied The Outlaw's Bible, which explains those boundaries in detail. It doesn't matter whether you're an outlaw yourself---if you homeschool your kids, for example, you'll want to teach them and yourself how to talk to cops or social workers if your state's Department of Education decides to sport wood for homeschoolers.

One Dudley Hiibel is too many.