Welcome to the police state

News broke this afternoon that New York will begin "random" searches of passengers' bags in subway stations.

I don't know what law enforcement officials think they'll get out of this. The best they can hope for is a deterrent effect. But if a coordinated group is intent on pursuing a series of London-style bombings, the "random" searches will at best catch one or two of these bombers, because there's no way they would catch all of them. These "random" searches would only up the ante for any such coordination -- maybe instead of four bastards trying to bomb subway cars, there will be a dozen of them playing the odds that some will get caught, but most won't.

How much information can cops glean from these "random" searches? Some of these explosives are so small in size that the "random" searches would probably require full-scale airport-like bag dumpings akin to what other idiots were doing at airport gates just after 9/11. If you've got a suitcase or a large backpack, the only way these "random" searches will work is to dump the contents and sift through every individual item.

Even if these "random" searches could be effective (which I'll never believe) they're unbelievably intrusive. No cop should be able to search your bag of sweaty gym clothes. I'm also willing to venture that people have items that are more sensitive: What if you have porn in your bag? What if you're a lawyer with privileged legal documents, or a banker with sensitive information on a corporation? What if you have a dime bag? It's not that you have any constitutional right to carry a dime bag, but you have a right under the Constitution not to be searched by the police without reasonable suspicion. Are millions of commuters now subject to the same deprivation of rights that people sacrifice when they go to the airport?

Lastly, this remark by police commissioner Ray Kelly is disgusting:

"We're going to alert our passengers on the subways as well as the commuter rail lines that their packages are subject to inspection," he said. "It's a safety issue. People don't consider any measures that you take for safety to be an inconvenience. This is New York City."

Basically, Kelly's saying that no one should care if their rights are undercut, as long as half-witted law enforcement officials justify their intrusions as safety measures.

So enjoy, my fellow New Yorkers. You can sleep safe at night knowing that law enforcement enacted a useless symbolic measure that will, at its most benign, impose great inconvenience to people who've done nothing wrong. Enjoy the stories from your stoner buddy from college about the close call he had riding the F-line, and from the secretary down the hall about how embarrassing it was when the cops searched her bag containing paraphernalia for her half-sister's bachelorette party. We'll all rest easy when the London-style attack comes here, knowing that we're not any safer and that our civil liberties got snuffed in the process.

Update: The superlative site Gothamist posted about this, and the comments are livid. Glad to know I'm not alone. I hate New York right now.