In a sudden development announced only today, starting tomorrow morning, the NYPD will begin randomly searching the bags of people riding the city’s subways, trains and buses.
Since 9/11, New York has instituted bag checks at museums and sporting events, and the police have sporadically checked bags during large public assemblies, like the New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square. But according to The New York Times, the police have never previously extended such searches to mass transit passengers, “even after a firebombing on a subway station in Lower Manhattan in 1994, a deadly sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway in 1995 and a foiled plot to bomb the subway in Brooklyn in 1997.”
So the London bombings inspired this announcement, right? Well, officials at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority told the Times that “internal discussions about random checks had been going on for several weeks—before the bombings of subway trains and buses in London on July 7 and again today.”
Yeah, O.K. By “internal discussions,” I think they meant two junior MTA employees talking about it for 15 seconds at the urinals, after which they launched into a spirited debate over the merits of Being Bobby Brown.
Random searches! Remember when the Transportation Security Administration adopted those and a day couldn’t pass without some hack writing a snide little column about how he personally saw some 85-year-old grandmother being given a patdown at the airport? I can’t wait for those. But New York is historically more fond of racism than ageism, with officials pre-emptively whispering assurances that they will “take pains to avoid racial and ethnic profiling.” They’ll also have to counter the ACLU, which is denouncing the searches and shrieking about a little thing called the Fourth Amendment.
So how random are we talking about here? How big will the sample size be? As I mentioned on Tuesday, Penn Station alone hosts 500,000 commuters a day. I’m too lazy to look up how many people take public transportation throughout the entire city daily, but rest assured it is A Very Big Number. What, will the cops stop anyone with a big bag? Every fifth person no matter what? Form a nice, New York-style slow-moving line? It seems no matter which course is taken, folks will be inconvenienced.
The last thing we need is soul-crushing lines in the subway stations, particularly now, when they’re all hot enough to brown a roast. (Although the terrorists might like it because then instead of bombing the trains, they can bomb the stations, filled with long lines of people waiting to be searched.) I mean, look how inefficient and useless the lines are at the airports now, and recall that they’ve been at that idiot semblance of security for what, almost four years now. I think if you instituted two lines at the airports, one for the usual TSA gauntlet and another year 2000-style line billed as “Skip Security and Take Your Chances with Terror! Proceed Directly to your Plane after Check-In,” they would have to leap out of the way to avoid being trampled by the rush of people.
We’ll see. As the searches unfold here starting tomorrow, there’ll be more details; I’ll keep y’all posted.
July 22 Update:
- According to the MTA, New York’s subway system, which is the prime target of the random searches, is the largest in the U.S., carrying about 4.5 million passengers on an average weekday.
- No delay for me on the subway this morning. I didn’t even see any searches, but then, I rise and leave for work early, before the crowds and the potential terror.
- Still no details on the frequency, location and duration of the searches.
- However, they actually started on a small scale yesterday, July 21. At Union Station, a reporter observed officers stopping five men over a 15-minute period during afternoon rush hour. “In each instance, the officers peered briefly into their bags, then waved them through.”
- If the cops find non bomb-related arrestable offences in your bag (drugs or such), they can arrest you, even though that’s not what they were searching you for.
- They’re sidestepping that legal snare by saying the searches are conducted with your consent, in the sense that if you enter a subway station and see cops searching bags, you’re allowed to leave without being searched or pursued.
- Great quote from Mayor Bloomberg: “We don’t plan to stop people on the streets. We probably don’t have the legal right to do that.”