Honest officer, I really did lose weight eating these sandwiches. Go ahead and search!
Posted on 08/04/2005 7:32:25 AM PDT by aculeus
The New York Civil Liberties Union will file suit against the city Thursday to keep police from searching the bags of passengers entering the subway, organization lawyers said.
The suit, which will be filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, will claim that the two-week old policy violates constitutional guarantees of equal protection and prohibitions against unlawful searches and seizures, while doing almost nothing to shield the city from terrorism.
It argues that the measure also allows the possibility for racial profiling, even though officers are ordered to randomly screen passengers.
"While concerns about terrorism of course justify -- indeed, require -- aggressive police tactics, those concerns cannot justify the Police Department's unprecedented policy of subjecting millions of innocent people to suspicionless searches," states the suit, a partial copy of which was provided to Newsday.
(Excerpt) Read more at nynewsday.com ...
I'm not crazy about trusting them too much either; but I'm less crazy about getting assaulted in a situation where I cannot perforce defend myself to the same degree as the antagonist.
If the government will NOT allow me to be armed in certain situations (planes, trains, etc.) to protect Myself and Mine then they damned well BETTER be doing THAT themselves.
The rest of the time: I'll watch out for myself, defend myself as is necessary, and let the government take care of any subsequent prosecution(s) - I am my own first-responder.
Do you wonder what the police might find if they searched the NYCLU's office?
Receipts for personal trips? personal purchases? telephone misure for personal reasons? porn?
Records of contacts with known or suspected terrorists?
All the more reason to stay away from any place where your government will NOT allow you to protect yourself. It's one thing to put your life in the hands of your fellow citizens, but trusting an entity as corrupt and incompetent as a government is ridiculous.
I'm all for having a gun and protecting myself(God knows in a few years we'll all have to defend ourselves in our own neighborhoods).In the NY subway situation a gun is useless.A guy is going to come in with a back pack and blow it .The police need to be able to search anyone and profile Middle Eastern men PERIOD..What are you going to do with your gun stand thete all day and stop people? In this situation the cops needs the right to do whats necessary and any conservative with half a brain knows that the best solution. I WANT people searched.it's not a nanny state situation ,it's a COMMON SENSE situation.
NYPD is totally on the ball..I trust them to protect me if given the CHANCE to do it right ..The ACLU bastards are trying to stop that from happening and will get us all killed eventually here in NYC.
That's all irrelevant anyway, since I ain't a Canadian. LOL.
I don't. And you can be sure that the men who wrote the U.S. Constitution would never have trusted them, either.
We should suspend Constitutional protections in America long enough to round up every last member, supporter and attorney for the ACLU and march them off to the Aleutians for permanent internment - no hope of parole or contact with the outside world.
Better yet, we should air-drop them all into Mecca during the "Stoning the Devil" ritual.
I'm happy they will test the legality of these searches in court.
I think the real reason behind these searches is to give the politicians a way out in the event we are attacked.
That way they can say at least we were trying to prevent it.
Since these searches will do little if anything to prevent an attack, it's just as well they do away with them.
The politicians will still have a way out: if an attack does happen, the politicians can blame the "leftist" judges and the ACLU for stopping the searches.
Honest officer, I really did lose weight eating these sandwiches. Go ahead and search!
I look at it this way: my chances of being on a train or a plane with a bomb-carrying sand-[n-word] are a hell of a lot less than my chances of being on said train or plane with a domestic, garden-variety gun- or knife-toting crazy.
It's nice that they're trying to protect people from the aforementioned bomb-carriers, but if they're not allowed to profile people and must resort to random or timed or 100% searches then it's ALSO nice that, as a by-product, they'll be noticing whatever ELSE the miscreants are carrying which could conceivably hurt ME.
Liberal or conservative, everybody's got the same initial reaction whether or not they're willing to admit it: I'm paying taxes for the government to protect ME and MINE first; and if they can protect everyone else too then that's so much the better.
BTW: you said "guns". I said "armed" - which could mean 'guns', or a lot more.
I don't think it would. If your trying to protect a multi-million dollar airliner carrying hundreds of people, searching everyone make sense.
If the terrorist are trying to kill 10-20 people, searching everyone just moves the point of attack to the queue outside the inspection station.
Ah, yes - well, it DOES say "photos from [your] OLD backyard"; One shouldn't have assumed…
These searches are nothing more than "window-dressing," as everyone knows they are utterly ineffective at preventing any kind of terrorist attack (particularly in the way they are carried out -- where people can turn around and walk out of the subway station if they don't want to be searched). The real reason for these searches is that they give the public some kind of assurance that their all-knowing, benevolent government is "doing something" on their behalf.
There's really nothing more to it. The NYCLU is opposed to these searches because they represent some kind of violation of our "civil liberties." I'm opposed to these searches because: 1) they are a waste of time and money, and 2) it is pointless to "protect" the citizenry in a jursidiction (New York City) whose very existence has largely been a violation of our "civil liberties" from top to bottom.
Does the NYCLU get to be sued out of existence by family members and surviving victims when a suicide bomber goes off in the New York subway?
What amazes me is that the same people who decry how wrong this type of action is think Lincoln was one of the greatest presidents...
ROFL!
I wish the things Lincoln did during the war were widely taught in school.
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