[via New York Daily News - Breaking News - Cops to check bags in NY subway [1]]
Police will begin conducting random searches of packages and backpacks carried by people entering city subways, Mayor Bloomberg announced Thursday after a new series of bomb attacks in London.
Authorities said the system for the checks is still being developed, but the plan is for passengers carrying bags to be selected at random before they have passed through turnstiles.
Random searches? OK. So the Patriot Act [2] gives them the ammunition they need for these random searches; can someone please tell me how profiling is not going to be put into place? I ask because I have never, ever been not profiled --and my Irish American husband should attest to that fact.
Why wouldn't profiling be put into place for this? How will it not be, when more than 4 million people use our public transportation system on a daily basis?
There are 468 subway stations in the system, most of which have multiple entrances, and during rush hours, the flood of humanity in and out of key stations can be overwhelming.
Asked whether the searches might create a bottlenecks at subway entrances, Kelly suggested the searches would be of a small enough sampling of passengers that only individuals, rather than whole crowds, would be delayed.
"We are going to do it in a reasonable common sense way," he said. Similar types of random searches of subway passengers have prompted complaints from civil liberties groups in other cities, and in some cases have been challenged in court.
Christopher Dunn, associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said the searches in New York could be problematic, if not conducted properly.
"The department can and should be actively and aggressively investigating anyone they suspect of bringing explosives into the subway, but police searches of people without any individualized suspicion is contrary to our most basic constitutional values," he said.
I sincerely do not believe this is the way to go. It is a show of force, not a real security measure.
Here in Stuyvesant-Town, where I live, MetLife set up checkpoints in each and every one of the roads that come into the apartment complex. If I'd take a taxi, they would stop the driver and make him open the trunk AND they would force me to show ID and my apartment keys. Meanwhile, I and anybody else could carry a bomb in a backpack or shopping cart if we walked into the complex. Why? They never checked pedestrians, only cars.
What Bloomberg is implementing is not a show of leadership. It is a scare tactic that only undermines citizen's freedoms and not the terrorists attempting to attack us.
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