How not to conduct Police Investigations
By Justin B
The Fourth Rail
The Paper of Record has this interesting article on New Yorks Efforts to keep the Subway's safe:
At some of the busiest of the city's 468 stations, riders will be asked to open their bags for a visual check before they go through the turnstiles. Those who refuse will not be permitted to bring the package into the subway but will be able to leave the station without further questioning, officials said.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly promised "a systematized approach" in the searches and said the basis for selecting riders for the checks would not be race, ethnicity or religion. The New York Civil Liberties Union questioned the legality of the searches, however, and Mr. Kelly said department lawyers were researching the constitutional implications.
Several weeks ago I posted about a group of Phoenix students that were stopped after trying to reenter the US from Canada during a school field trip. Here is the latest update to that saga.
A federal immigration judge on Thursday tossed out deportation cases against four Phoenix students who are in the United States illegally, saying they were targeted by immigration officials at the Canadian border because they are Hispanic.
U.S. Immigration Judge John Richardson said the government violated the students' constitutional rights against illegal search and seizure and that officials unlawfully obtained evidence against the four.
Immigration experts said the ruling was unusual because proving racial profiling is difficult. It is not expected to have a broad impact because undocumented immigrants who have lived in the country since they were children rarely are subjected to such deportation proceedings.
Let's see. Four kids coming across the border with a group of several white teenagers. These kids do not have the proper paperwork. The are not US citizens. But we violated the rights of these illegal immigrants because we singled them out and applied extra scrutiny because their national origin did not appear the same as the others. Police should have applied the same scrutiny to Bobby Sue Jones as they did to everyone else. We have a huge illegal immigration problem with people from A. Wisconsin B. Greenland or C. Mexico?
Good police do not have the time or the resources to look at EVERYONE. They have to focus on those that appear out of the ordinary. The person may appear out of the ordinary due to behavior, appearance, or some other factor. What is not OK is to target and harass one group due to an internal racial bias of the police office, but that is not the case here. This was not profiling for the Wilson Four. This was immigration officials finding people that do not belong, but our government cannot enforce our laws because we are handicapped by political correctness. Reality is that these kids should be allowed to stay in the US, but it certainly is not due to their 4th Amendment rights being violated.
Since I cannot possibly state it any better, let me quote the often outspoken, but always humorous Ann Coulter when she describes how Airline Security should work. And the same folks that take your nail clippers or lighters at the airport, now are in charge of keeping the subways safe. Airline travel is so much safer now that we have spent billions of dollars on everything from Air Marshalls to new X-Ray machines to creating the TSA.
In June 2001, as Mohamed Atta completed his final "to do" list before the 9-11 attacks ("... amend will to ban women from my funeral ... leave extra little Friskies out for Mr. Buttons ... set TiVo for Streisand on 'Inside the Actors' Studio' ..."), Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta was conducting a major study on whether airport security was improperly screening passengers based on ethnicity. As Mineta explained: "We must protect the civil rights of airline passengers." Protecting airline passengers from sudden death has never made it onto Mineta's radar screen.
A few months later, after 19 Muslim men hijacked U.S. airplanes and turned them into weapons of mass destruction on American soil, Mineta was a whirlwind of activity. On Sept. 21, as the remains of thousands of Americans lay smoldering at Ground Zero, Mineta fired off a letter to all U.S. airlines forbidding them from implementing the one security measure that would have prevented 9-11: subjecting Middle Eastern passengers to an added degree of pre-flight scrutiny. He sternly reminded the airlines that it was illegal to discriminate against passengers based on their race, color, national or ethnic origin, or religion.
Mineta would have sent the letter even sooner, but he wanted to give the airlines enough time to count the number of their employees and customers who had just been murdered by Arab passengers.
...
Despite Mineta's clearly worded letter immediately after the 9-11 terrorist attacks and another follow-up letter in October, the Department of Transportation found that in the weeks after the 9-11 terrorist attacks carried out by Middle Eastern men, the airlines were targeting passengers who appeared to be Middle Eastern. To his horror, Mineta discovered that the airlines were using logic and deductive reasoning to safeguard their passengers – in direct violation of his just-issued guidelines on racial profiling!
Like many of you, I carefully reviewed the lawsuits against the airlines in order to determine which airlines had engaged in the most egregious discrimination, so I could fly only that airline. But oddly, rather than bragging about the charges, the airlines heatedly denied discriminating against Middle Eastern passengers. What a wasted marketing opportunity! Imagine the great slogans the airlines could use:
"Now Frisking All Arabs – Twice!"
"More Civil-Rights Lawsuits Brought by Arabs Than Any Other Airline!"
"The Friendly Skies – Unless You're an Arab"
"You Are Now Free to Move About the Cabin – Not So Fast, Mohammed!"
Subway's are not private residences. They are public places. And posted in Big letters at the entrace to every one of them should be a sign that says all belongs are subject to search. Your entry into this area authorizes any and all searches of your property. I cannot walk into a courthouse or airport and claim that my rights were violated because my bag gets searched. If you don't like the rules, take a cab, walk, buy a car, etc.
And knowing that there are not enough resources to watch everyone, why not focus on those that fit the profile of previous suicide bombers? Sorry if you look like a terrorist. If you look like a serial killer, your neighbor might rat you out to America's Most Wanted, but if you are not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about. If you are carrying a dime bag across town on the subway and your bag gets searched because the police are looking for suicide bombers, then perhaps you should not be trying to take a dime bag across town. Ask Damon Stodamire of the Portland Trailblazers about that. (Caught in the airport with an oz. of the reefer)
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