Security Theater
After the London Tube bombings, New York City instituted random bag searches in its subway system. At random times (mostly rush hour), cops are posted at random stations (mostly the big ones) and they stop some percentage of people with large bags (backpacks or bigger, it seems). People can decline to be searched if they want.
This practice has been derided as security theater and rightly so. It looks like the police are doing something, but the procedures don’t actually increase safety or security. In theory, looking in bags makes us all a little safer from bombs in bags. In practice, people who don’t want cops snooping in their bags do what I do– leave the station and enter the subway via a different entrance.
The only thing produced by random bag searches is less privacy for the people who are honest enough to submit to voluntary searches.
May 2nd, 2007 at 11:11 am
Theater? My foot. To date, no plane has been taken down with toenail clippers or a tube of toothpaste with a capacity exceeding four ounces. The system works! Why do you hate America?
Sarcasm for people who need to be told that.
May 2nd, 2007 at 11:30 am
I often carry things in my bag that I don’t want to have to explain to a 19-year-old kid with limited capacity for flexible thinking. The privacy and anonymity of the city is giving way to ubiquitous security cameras backed up by facial recognition software. I’m not so much angry about it as sad.
May 2nd, 2007 at 2:50 pm
There was a funny bit on the TV show 30 rock a few weeks ago. The lead character was searched prior to going into the subway, and the AR-toting cop kept pulling out embarrassing items.
The next segment had the character in Cleveland on vacation. She was stopped by a cop, and she prepared to give him her bag to search, but the cop just asked her if she wanted to pet the police horse.
May 2nd, 2007 at 6:28 pm
Funny that you post this today, they had a table set up at my station this morning, which I hadn’t seen for a while. When they started doing it back in 2005 I posted A Comprehensive Explanation Of My Objections.
It can be argued that making people FEEL more secure is something worth doing, even if they’re not.
But we’re in New York City, after all—9/11 happened here—we lived through it. Almost every person in this city lost someone, knows someone who lost someone, was in the towers, or watched it happen in person. We’re well aware that we’re a target for terrorist acts. Furthermore, we’ve always been aware that the subways were a prime target—after all, one of the first things that happened on 9/11 after the planes struck the tower was the shutting down and securing of the subways.
It didn’t take a Madrid or a London for us to know that our public transportation system was vulnerable to attack—we knew it, and accepted it as an unavoidable risk of living here and traveling underground in our beloved trains. But the risk and possibility of attack was something that we sort of put out of our minds—the spectre of such an attack was in the background. We tried not to think about it, because we need our trains and we still have a much higher chance of getting killed by a taxi cab (or the flu) than getting killed in a terrorist attack.
But the bag searches force us to think about the possibility of a bomb on our train every single time they have them. Every morning when we walk down into the station and see “potential bombers” getting their bags searched forces us to think about a bomb going off on our train, whether we want to or not. That certainly has the opposite effect of making us feel safer. They make us feel more vulnerable than ever.
I remain opposed.
May 2nd, 2007 at 9:35 pm
“People who are honest enough to submit”? Stupid enough you mean.
May 2nd, 2007 at 11:26 pm
Colin Ferguson went off on one of your trains and to date nobody in office has seen fit to dismantle your decreed helplessness. I wouldn’t count too much on the administration, police or otherwise, being on your side.
In fact, they seem to be intent on assuring more helpless victims. Color me skeptical. I still can’t see helplessness as a security measure.
May 3rd, 2007 at 11:17 am
“Colin Ferguson went off on one of your trains and to date nobody in office has seen fit to dismantle your decreed helplessness.”
I went to high school on LI, and a month or so after Colin Ferguson went nuts on a train, there was a debate in my high school about gun laws. It was a very staid talk with both sides keeping things polite and intellectual.
Then this young lady got up to speak. She was a classmate, someone I’d never paid any attention to because I was a couple years ahead of her. She was this quiet girl, meek even, not the person you would expect to stand up and make speeches about political issues.
The girl started off very calmly and quietly giving her personal view on the horrors of guns. Just when she’d lost everybody’s attention, she veered hard into a personal account of the terror she suffers because her father was on Ferguson’s train. The man sitting next to him was shot in the head, and her nightmares were filled with images of her father being killed in that manner.
As she told this story, the poor dear was sobbing, fitting short phrases between gasps for air and sniffles. It was a very moving demonstration of how much damage can be done by one man with a firearm. When she finished, the room was deathly silent except for her crying.
I hope that girl got some catharsis from telling her story that day. In my memory, I was supposed to speak after her, and in my memory I instead ended the debate, but who knows if that memory is accurate. What I do know is that when I think of victims of random violence, I don’t think of people dying. I think of their families, and I think of her, this girl sobbing in a room full of strangers at the thought of losing her dad.