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.
> 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?
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!
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.
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).
> 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.
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
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.
> 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.
Really it comes down to the fact that many people rely on all of those transportation methods to do things like work, study, visit family, etc., and can't do it another way, because of time, money, or whatever. Under those circumstances, any government hoops to jump through should not be considered voluntary and consensual.
The NYC subway system is particularly sensitive to this, as others have pointed out, because so many people use this to work every day. You can say the bus is an alternative, but what about when they make a requirement to get on the bus? (TSA has already been caught at Greyhound stations!)
...or looked at from an entirely different angle, why should there be people trying to determine if I have a gun in a bus, on the subway, or on the streets of New York? Aren't guns legal in America? The fact of the matter is that it is so impossible to lawfully carry a gun in NYC that the cops, now using these scanners, presume you can't have one. Imagine a Texas sheriff with a scanner. "Excuse me sir, I've scanned you and you have a gun on you." "Yeah, so?"
I don't disagree with your last paragraph but I'm not sure what your point is except expressing a tautology. Let's pretend that there was no way to hide a gun (Mayor Bloomberg bans clothing in the summer as a way to curb the problem of people hiding high fat snacks in their pockets)...are you saying that police should not take notice of people carrying firearms, give the very low incidence of legally opened firearms?
How else could they enforce the city's laws, besides waiting for someone to actively commit a crime with the gun before they can ask if the gun is legally owned?
That's exactly what I'm saying. The carrying of a firearm should not be considered evidence of a crime in progress in and of itself. Nowhere else in America, save for NJ, IL, and DC, is it unusual for someone walking down the streets to be in possession of a firearm. Lawful firearm owners should not be harassed to prove their lawful status at every turn. The police can ask questions when they have reasonable suspicion.
> "Nowhere else in America, save for NJ, IL, and DC, is it unusual for someone walking down the streets to be in possession of a firearm."
Right, so we've established that legal firearm ownership is vastly outnumbered by illegal firearm ownership in the above places, and that seeing a legal firearm on the street is in fact extremely rare.
So... you live in an area where there is a substantial known presence of illegal guns, that isn't balanced by a substantial ownership of legal guns. When you see a gun, how is it not at all suspicious?
I do not see your conclusion as a logical extension of constitutional principles, it seems more informed by your own stance re: gun ownership. The constitution grants the right to search upon reasonable suspicion - I'm unsure how a gun's appearance in a place where there are almost no legal ones fails that bar.
Whether or not NY should have such strict gun laws is an entirely separate debate - as it stands it seems perfectly reasonable for the presence of a gun to be suspicious.
"imagine the chaos it would cause if a suicide bomber detonated a bomb on a train in the tube.[..] That would have devastating effects on the economy (both locally and nationally)"
A bomb of the sort that would fit into a backpack would probably disable the car the bomber was riding it, kill people immediately near the bomber, injure folks farther away in the car, and do pretty much minimal-to-no damage to the tracks or tunnel. In the worst case, the affected tunnel would be out of commission for a few days/couple of weeks while the tracks were cleared and everything would get back to normal.
I can imagine all sorts of bad things. That doesn't mean we have to try to protect against all of them all of the time. You can reasonably protect against black swan events, and trying to do so is costly in so many ways: money, liberties, convenience, etc.
Everybody is so afraid of dying that they don't dare to live.
RE: loss of the transbay tube. The Bay Bridge carries roughly the same number of commuters as the transbay tube. In the 1989 earthquake part of the bridge collapsed and it took several weeks to repair. The Bay Area did not screech to a halt. Sure we were inconvenienced and there was some economic damage, but we coped.
In much the same way as a public park is a piece of the public infrastructure, and so no one ought be denied use/be forced to assent to a search prior to using, except for constitutional cause, public transit systems ought follow the same rules.
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.