"You think it's unreasonable for the police to search backpacks of subway riders?"
Would you think it unreasonable to search every backpack of people walking down the sidewalk?
I'm not asking just rhetorically, I'm really curious, at what point do you think it is unreasonable?
And if you think it's okay to search everyone walking down the sidewalk, what about searching everyone's car, whenever they enter a metropolitan area?
After all, a car bomb will do more danger than a backpack bomb...
Ed
The police, in fact, have made random searches of cars entering the Lincoln and Holland tunnels so that has already happened.
These searches did not become institutionalized. The searches were not extended to the city's streets, parks, and apartment houses.
New York is a city of people just waiting to become litigants. Everyone "knows their rights" and knows a lawyer. The picture you paint of New York City police becoming the Gestapo is not realistic. The Village Voice used that argument to oppose every move that Rudy Guiliani made for 8 years and would gladly have driven him from office if they could. New York would have been the poorer if they had.
My opinion is that, as citizens, we have both rights and responsibilities. One responsibility, in my opinion, is to cooperate with law enforcement--especially since we don't have the kind of security system that exists in London and New York is still on the terrorists' hit list.