Seeing orange

Dude, it's been Policy Week at Cole Slaw Blog, which sucks in a way, but also has been kind of fun. There's a lot more to be said about John Roberts (I'm in favor) and the unconstitutional and ineffective subway searches (I'm opposed). These are troubled times, such that even Spinachdip, the more palatable vegetable dish, worries that he's sounding bitter.

No worries. We'll soon be back to writing about favorite fruits and eccentric friends, with intermittent Roberts breakdowns.

But Policy Week wouldn't have closure without a little more rantin' and ravin' about the totally half-assed and ill-conceived justifications for the NYPD's standardless, arbitrary, and unlawful satchel searching.

First off is Mayor Bloomberg. I've liked Bloomberg for a long time, despite lapses in judgment like the West Side Stadium and his refusal to denounce Karl Rove's slander about liberals and 9/11. But those lapses weren't unconstitutional. As quoted in the Times:

"I hope that we have established the right balance here, providing the kind of security we need while not being too intrusive and not violating their rights," he said in his weekly radio program on WABC-AM. "The way we've done this is: You can walk away if you don't want your bag searched; you just can't get on the subway. So we do it outside the turnstile. And there's no profiling."

It's clear under established law that a cop can question anyone without suspicion, provided that the person is permitted to decline and go about his or her business. This is different. It is coercive. Under this rationale, the NYPD could post cops on every street corner, demand to search people and their belongings, but claim it was okay because you're free to turn around and walk back to your apartment.

As far as the "no profiling" remark, this is a two-edged sword. "No profiling" is a way of saying that the searches are wholly standardless and arbitrary. But if there were to be profiling, it would likely be discriminatory. With these types of searches, they're bound to be either ineffective or unconstitutional. The current system manages, horribly, to achieve both.

They're taking notes about the people they're searching:

At Woodlawn-Jerome Avenue in the Bronx, riders like Shauna Murray, 23, were directed to a white plastic table like the ones used at airport security checkpoints. One officer pointed a small black flashlight into Ms. Murray's black Adidas bag, while another made a notation on a sheet of paper.

This might be totally benign. The notation might be a check mark recording how many searches made that day. But for all we know, notation might make note of the person's race, the contents of their bags, etc.

But why suspect the worst?

At Sutphin Boulevard-Archer Avenue in Jamaica, Queens, officers were seen asking riders to show a driver's license or other identification and writing down the personal information. Several of the riders - whose bags were searched but who were not detained or told they had done anything wrong - said in interviews that they felt their privacy had been violated.

The article goes on to note that this was an aberration on the part of some officers who got carried away. As if that's comforting. God knows that the NYPD doesn't have a history of being given an inch and taking a mile.

What galls me more than my suspicion that this rampant fear-mongering is a Bush-like ploy on Bloomberg's part to spread fear in order to be perceived as a protector (the success of this move is underscored the many sad, paranoid, terrified people who support this) is the City's failure to provide a plausible explanation for why they're doing this. They've said things about wanting to make potential terrorists think twice, wanting to reassure the public, dropping allusions to London, as though that clarifies how something suddenly changed on Thursday that was different from the last three years. It certainly doesn't offer a reasonable explanation for why they're conducting these searches, and what the nexus might be between this specific system of searches and any security threat.

The bumpersticker justifications would be cute and cool if this were a non-intrusive move, like posting more plainclothed cops on subway platforms. But it isn't. At its most benign, it's a misuse of resources and public harrassment; at its worst, it's a flagrant violation of the 4th and 14th Amendments.

And with that, I'm off to a Mets game.