A Week of Random Backpack Searches Yields Little Drama
Robert Caplin/The New York TimesAndrew Wade, a cadet on his way back to West Point, opened his bag on Friday for inspection in Grand Central Terminal.
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By PATRICK McGEEHAN
Published: July 30, 2005
In the past eight days, the New York Police Department has randomly searched through the bags of several thousand commuters in more than 400 subway stations. About 20,000 other travelers have submitted to inspections of their belongings in bus terminals and commuter train stations in and around the city.
The results from the first full week of this unprecedented, systematic search of commuters in the New York area: One arrest for possession of illegal fireworks, zero legal challenges and, according to the police and transit officials, minimal resistance.
A New York police spokesman said the thousands of searches conducted in the subways had led to no arrests, nor to the confiscation of any weapons or other items. He said the department was not keeping track of how many people declined to submit to a search.
Samuel J. Plumeri Jr., the superintendent of the Port Authority Police Department, said that his officers had inspected the briefcases, backpacks and purses of 8,010 commuters in PATH train stations and bus terminals this week without making a single arrest. Only five people had refused to cooperate, and each of them walked away without any incident, he said.
"We really had, I would say, no issues at all," said Mr. Plumeri, who described the rate of refusal as "remarkably low."
Not even the New York Civil Liberties Union, which is considering filing a lawsuit to stop the searches, had documented any serious conflicts caused by the new policy.
In the eyes of the police, the absence of drama was a sign of success. They had completed a full week of searches without disrupting the routines of millions of commuters or encountering any real trouble.
But the relative calm left commuters with mixed emotions. While they were relieved not to have been put through any extraordinary hassles, they questioned how much safer these modestly intrusive and sometimes barely visible measures could render them.
By yesterday afternoon, anyway, some commuters were wondering aloud what all the fuss - the headlines, the grave talk about balancing safety and personal rights - had been about, as they passed through subway stations and saw no sign of the prying police.
"I feel like they've disappeared," said Kristin Kasun, 23, a financial analyst from Hoboken, as she climbed the steps to the street at the Broadway-Lafayette station.
"It was really good Monday and Tuesday," Ms. Kasun said. "The police were visible. I saw random checks everywhere."
For their part, police officials said they had not, and would not anytime soon, scale back the inspections. Indeed, on Thursday, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority started dispatching four-member teams of uniformed officers with dogs to ride trains on the Metro-North Railroad and Long Island Rail Road, said Tom Kelly, a spokesman for the authority, which operates those commuter trains as well as the subway system.
Yesterday, Gov. George E. Pataki ordered hundreds of additional National Guard troops to help the police monitor activity in subway stations, train depots and ferry terminals in New York City.
The New York Police Department, for its part, was expecting to have conducted searches in every station in the subway system, from Eastchester to Far Rockaway, by last night, said Paul J. Browne, the top department spokesman. Since July 7, he said, hundreds of additional officers had been sent into the subways and other transit facilities, at an estimated cost of $1.3 million to $1.9 million a week in overtime pay.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, speaking to the news media after a department promotion ceremony, said that the public had so far been supportive of the subway searches, and he dismissed suggestions his officers would need to engage in racial profiling in order to be more effective.
The police department held several training sessions last week to instruct supervisors on how to do bag searches properly, Mr. Browne said. He said approximately 100 police and transit captains and counterterrorism inspectors were instructed on how to quickly look through bags and identify explosives, and how to conduct the searches legally.
If commuters had few complaints about a practice that could deter terrorists from attacking the transit system, it cannot be all bad, police officials said.
"Isn't that a wonderful thing?" Mr. Plumeri asked.
Not really, said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
"Compliance with the policy should not be mistaken for approval," Ms. Lieberman said. "New Yorkers are always in a hurry. Many people need to use the subways and have chosen to comply and undergo whatever privacy invasion they are subject to rather than be inconvenienced."
Ms. Lieberman said the group's monitors had seen one or two people leave the subway rather than agree to turn over a bag, but she added that she had received no reports of confrontations or arrests.
In New Jersey, transit police officers have inspected nearly 5,000 bags without any resistance, even from one man who should have walked away. A 21-year-old Bayonne resident was arrested in Hoboken on Monday afternoon when he tried to board a trolley with a duffel bag that contained illegal fireworks known as M-80's. He was released after the police determined he posed no threat, said Joseph C. Bober, chief of the New Jersey Transit police.
"I thought that we would get some type of resistance, but that has not been the case," Chief Bober said.
Several subway riders who voiced support for the searches as a deterrent to terrorism said they had been prepared to be searched but had not encountered any inspection checkpoints in a week of traveling underground.
"I can't imagine it can be effective, realistically, in a subway system this large," said Bardo Ramirez, 34, a film production accountant who grew up in New York and has been visiting for a week from his home in Los Angeles. Mr. Ramirez was carrying a large gray bag and a leather briefcase off the F train at 14th Street. "But if it makes people feel better, it's probably worth it."
Edison Rivera, 40, a consultant to Hispanic immigrants, said most of his clients were afraid to use the subway while the searches were being conducted.
"They think that they might ask for documents, and that they might be deported," Mr. Rivera said. "If they see cops, they go to the next stop."
Kareem Fahim, Lily Koppel and Colin Moynihan contributed reporting for this article. |
