Against a Culture of Permission: The ACLU Challenges the Subway Searches in New York at Law & Society Blog

Against a Culture of Permission: The ACLU Challenges the Subway Searches in New York

Published by Hanno Kaiser August 8th, 2005 in Law and Society

The NYCLU filed a complaint in the Southern District of New York, seeking preliminary and permanent injunctive relief against

a program, unprecedented in this country, under which millions of innocent New Yorkers are subject to suspicionless searches by the police. The New York City Police Department has adopted and is enforcing a criminal, law-enforcement policy and practice of searching the possessions of those seeking to enter the New York City subway system without any suspicion of wrongdoing whatsoever.

The complaint correctly focuses on the absurd design of the program:

Under the subway search program as the Police Department has implemented it, the NYPD is not conducting searches at most subway entrances at any given time, is giving advance notice at those entrances where searches are being conducted, is allowing people selected for a search to walk away, and is not basing the searches on any suspicious activity of individuals. Consequently, as common sense would suggest, the NYPD’s subway search program is virtually certain neither to catch any person trying to carry explosives into the subway system nor to deter such an effort. Indeed, given the way the Department has implemented its search program, the only people being searched are innocent users of the subway system.

The subway search program is yet another step towards a culture of permission, a culture in which basic rights (such as the right to move freely within a city) are conditioned upon obtaining prior approval from the government or one of its many delegates. It is hard to understand why there is so little outrage over these policies. Are people (New Yorkers, mind you) really so docile? It is hard to walk tall if you have to ask for permission to do so every step of the way. Maybe in time even the New Hampshire license plates will read: “Live free, pending prior authorization, or die.” In the words of the complaint:

The constitutional right of people not suspected of any wrongdoing to be free from police searches is one of the most fundamental protections of our free society. While concerns about terrorism of course justify — indeed, require — aggressive police tactics, those concerns cannot justify the Police Department’s unprecedented policy of subjecting millions of innocent people to suspicionless searches in a way that is virtually certain not to identify any person seeking to engage in terrorist activity and will not have any meaningful deterrent effect.

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2 Responses to “Against a Culture of Permission: The ACLU Challenges the Subway Searches in New York”

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1 Kira Zalan Aug 9th, 2005 at 12:21 pm

First, we must stop pretending that the terrorists so far, by-and-large, have not been of the same ethnic origin. This will reasonably narrow down the search for potential perpetrators. But, it makes ALMOST as little sense to stop every Arab or North African in NYC today as it does to stop every 5th random person. Therefore, the profiling must be even more exact than race to be effective.

Israel has been perfecting the art of profiling, and has successfully prevented El Al (national airline) hijackings since 1970. The profilers are trained to look for signs of suspicious behavior (body language), which provides effective clues of whom to question. Barring exceptional con artists, body language is a dead give away of suspicious behavior. In fact, police officers are trained to look for such clues when dealing with everyday criminals.

The results: plenty of Arabs fly El Al, and yet enough people have been turned away to prevent terrorist attacks since 1970.

So why not fly some Israelis to NYC to train New York’s finest on such tactics?