5 ms·

> In concept, how is this different than being forced to walk through a metal detector? Well, you generally have a choice (kinda) to walk through a metal detec

> In concept, how is this different than being forced to walk through a metal detector? Well, you generally have a choice (kinda) to walk through a metal detector. People should be protect from random searches while walking around the streets. At one time there were very specific cases where you had to submit to a search -- one being hot pursuit.

danso 14y ago
I guess that's true. I forgot that the NYPD can search through all of your stuff when you enter a subway, but you have the right to refuse and just not take the subway (at least at that station)
- potatolicious 14y ago
  In NYC the subway is critical infrastructure, as important as electricity or water, denial of its use should not be taken lightly. Denial of this service to people who would not submit to a search, IMO, makes this highly coercive and the search can no longer be considered strictly voluntary. One has to remember that having seen the flip side of the urban coin, New York City has taken the stance that quality of life ought to be enforced via any means necessary: legal or extralegal. Both stop and frisk as well as the bag searches on the subway do not pass even a cursory constitutionality examination, but that doesn't seem to bother anyone.
  - Spooky23 14y ago
    > Both stop and frisk as well as the bag searches on the subway do not pass even a cursory constitutionality examination, but that doesn't seem to bother anyone. Correction: "s/anyone./white people, and we don't pay much attention to whining from those other people./" The point of this was that the cops were supposed to stop and talk to people (685,724 in 2011) and frisk those if the officer is reasonably suspicious that the person has a weapon that could harm the officer (381,948 in 2011). Of those, 7,257 have a weapon. Have you ever been interrogated by a policeman? Should you be put in that position every day? See: http://www.nyclu.org/news/new-nyclu-report-finds-nypd-stop-and-frisk-practices-ineffective-reveals-depth-of-racial-dispar http://www.nyclu.org/news/new-nyclu-report-finds-nypd-stop-a...
    - tsaoutourpants 14y ago
      All on point. These new scanners essentially allow the NYPD to conduct virtual stop-and-frisks, and now the public won't be able to sue them because they won't even know they're being searched!
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      7,257 out of 381,948... wow. With a success rate as abysmal as that, it is a wonder that we still take a police officers "gut instinct" as seriously as we do.
      - tsaoutourpants 14y ago
        Most of the rest of those 382K searches weren't victims of mistaken "gut instinct" but rather officers knowingly searching them without cause. NYPD pressures its street cops to perform these searches using quotas (which they refuse to call quotas).
  - jack-r-abbit 14y ago
    In NYC the subway is critical infrastructure, as important as electricity or water, denial of its use should not be taken lightly. Denial of this service to people who would not submit to a search, IMO, makes this highly coercive and the search can no longer be considered strictly voluntary. Being a frequent user of BART (SF Bay Area Rapid Transit), I understand where you are coming from about how so many people have come to really rely on the public transit systems. But I don't think the NYC subway or BART is anymore critical than air travel. If you were not able to take the subway, you do have other options (bus, cab, walk, etc). Yes... those other options are a lot less convenient and/or more costly, but the same can be said of the alternatives to air travel (bus, train, car, etc). Every time I go through the Trans-Bay Tube (the BART tunnel under the bay that connects all East Bay BART lines to San Francisco), I think "imagine the chaos it would cause if a suicide bomber detonated a bomb on a train in the tube." So many people use this to commute in both directions, the Bay Area would screech to a halt. That would have devastating effects on the economy (both locally and nationally). I imagine the same can be said if that happened in one of the subway tunnels. I don't think it is too far out of "reasonable" to want to protect them like we want to protect airplanes. That being said, the TSA is a huge failure and should not be used as a model for how to protect the railways.
    - king_jester 14y ago
      > Being a frequent user of BART (SF Bay Area Rapid Transit), I understand where you are coming from about how so many people have come to really rely on the public transit systems. But I don't think the NYC subway or BART is anymore critical than air travel. If you were not able to take the subway, you do have other options (bus, cab, walk, etc). Yes... those other options are a lot less convenient and/or more costly, but the same can be said of the alternatives to air travel (bus, train, car, etc). These forms of transit aren't even close in comparison. They serve different kinds of traffic density, the cost to ride is not even in the same ballpark, and it is NOT feasible to travel around NYC without access to the subway unless you have a large amount of money to spend on cabs (chain bus transit is not time effective for traversing boroughs). In fact, the NYPD relies on the fact that traveling in any way other than subway is so much of a PITA that people will mostly accept a subway search. Those searches are at the discretion of the officers present, which as we've seen with stop and frisk becomes a racist, classist implementation.
  - darkarmani 14y ago
    > Denial of this service to people who would not submit to a search, IMO, makes this highly coercive and the search can no longer be considered strictly voluntary I agree with you, which is why in the grandparent post i said "kinda." I think it is a HUGE constitutional stretch to not have freedom of movement on public transportation systems. Roads and sidewalks are public transportation systems, so why shouldn't we have constitutional protections on public subways/buses? The next level of chipping away at this is to have quasi-goverment agencies (government owned corporations, etc) like the one controlling the GW bridge. It pissed me off when the GW bridge used to have signs that said "Photography is prohibited." I really wanted to start a website collecting photographs of the GW bridge, just to show how useless the ban was.
    - tsaoutourpants 14y ago
      I wouldn't even consider Port Authority to be "quasi-government" -- it's essentially a collaboration of the governments of NY and NJ. Luckily, those photography signs were removed since they cannot be constitutionally enforced. There's actually a great guy in Miami now (no, not me ;)) who fights battles about photography all the time. He recently got his ass kicked bt gov't security contractors for taking pictures of a train track. His site is photographyisnotacrime.com

danso 14y ago

I guess that's true. I forgot that the NYPD can search through all of your stuff when you enter a subway, but you have the right to refuse and just not take the subway (at least at that station)

potatolicious 14y ago
In NYC the subway is critical infrastructure, as important as electricity or water, denial of its use should not be taken lightly. Denial of this service to people who would not submit to a search, IMO, makes this highly coercive and the search can no longer be considered strictly voluntary. One has to remember that having seen the flip side of the urban coin, New York City has taken the stance that quality of life ought to be enforced via any means necessary: legal or extralegal. Both stop and frisk as well as the bag searches on the subway do not pass even a cursory constitutionality examination, but that doesn't seem to bother anyone.
- Spooky23 14y ago
  > Both stop and frisk as well as the bag searches on the subway do not pass even a cursory constitutionality examination, but that doesn't seem to bother anyone. Correction: "s/anyone./white people, and we don't pay much attention to whining from those other people./" The point of this was that the cops were supposed to stop and talk to people (685,724 in 2011) and frisk those if the officer is reasonably suspicious that the person has a weapon that could harm the officer (381,948 in 2011). Of those, 7,257 have a weapon. Have you ever been interrogated by a policeman? Should you be put in that position every day? See: http://www.nyclu.org/news/new-nyclu-report-finds-nypd-stop-and-frisk-practices-ineffective-reveals-depth-of-racial-dispar http://www.nyclu.org/news/new-nyclu-report-finds-nypd-stop-a...
  - tsaoutourpants 14y ago
    All on point. These new scanners essentially allow the NYPD to conduct virtual stop-and-frisks, and now the public won't be able to sue them because they won't even know they're being searched!
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    7,257 out of 381,948... wow. With a success rate as abysmal as that, it is a wonder that we still take a police officers "gut instinct" as seriously as we do.
    - tsaoutourpants 14y ago
      Most of the rest of those 382K searches weren't victims of mistaken "gut instinct" but rather officers knowingly searching them without cause. NYPD pressures its street cops to perform these searches using quotas (which they refuse to call quotas).
- jack-r-abbit 14y ago
  In NYC the subway is critical infrastructure, as important as electricity or water, denial of its use should not be taken lightly. Denial of this service to people who would not submit to a search, IMO, makes this highly coercive and the search can no longer be considered strictly voluntary. Being a frequent user of BART (SF Bay Area Rapid Transit), I understand where you are coming from about how so many people have come to really rely on the public transit systems. But I don't think the NYC subway or BART is anymore critical than air travel. If you were not able to take the subway, you do have other options (bus, cab, walk, etc). Yes... those other options are a lot less convenient and/or more costly, but the same can be said of the alternatives to air travel (bus, train, car, etc). Every time I go through the Trans-Bay Tube (the BART tunnel under the bay that connects all East Bay BART lines to San Francisco), I think "imagine the chaos it would cause if a suicide bomber detonated a bomb on a train in the tube." So many people use this to commute in both directions, the Bay Area would screech to a halt. That would have devastating effects on the economy (both locally and nationally). I imagine the same can be said if that happened in one of the subway tunnels. I don't think it is too far out of "reasonable" to want to protect them like we want to protect airplanes. That being said, the TSA is a huge failure and should not be used as a model for how to protect the railways.
  - king_jester 14y ago
    > Being a frequent user of BART (SF Bay Area Rapid Transit), I understand where you are coming from about how so many people have come to really rely on the public transit systems. But I don't think the NYC subway or BART is anymore critical than air travel. If you were not able to take the subway, you do have other options (bus, cab, walk, etc). Yes... those other options are a lot less convenient and/or more costly, but the same can be said of the alternatives to air travel (bus, train, car, etc). These forms of transit aren't even close in comparison. They serve different kinds of traffic density, the cost to ride is not even in the same ballpark, and it is NOT feasible to travel around NYC without access to the subway unless you have a large amount of money to spend on cabs (chain bus transit is not time effective for traversing boroughs). In fact, the NYPD relies on the fact that traveling in any way other than subway is so much of a PITA that people will mostly accept a subway search. Those searches are at the discretion of the officers present, which as we've seen with stop and frisk becomes a racist, classist implementation.
- darkarmani 14y ago
  > Denial of this service to people who would not submit to a search, IMO, makes this highly coercive and the search can no longer be considered strictly voluntary I agree with you, which is why in the grandparent post i said "kinda." I think it is a HUGE constitutional stretch to not have freedom of movement on public transportation systems. Roads and sidewalks are public transportation systems, so why shouldn't we have constitutional protections on public subways/buses? The next level of chipping away at this is to have quasi-goverment agencies (government owned corporations, etc) like the one controlling the GW bridge. It pissed me off when the GW bridge used to have signs that said "Photography is prohibited." I really wanted to start a website collecting photographs of the GW bridge, just to show how useless the ban was.
  - tsaoutourpants 14y ago
    I wouldn't even consider Port Authority to be "quasi-government" -- it's essentially a collaboration of the governments of NY and NJ. Luckily, those photography signs were removed since they cannot be constitutionally enforced. There's actually a great guy in Miami now (no, not me ;)) who fights battles about photography all the time. He recently got his ass kicked bt gov't security contractors for taking pictures of a train track. His site is photographyisnotacrime.com