Random Bag Checks
July 21, 2005
8:10 pm
New York City Police are going to start doing random bag checks on bus, train, and subway goers.
Everyone close your eyes and sing the “there’s no way to narrow down the list of who might be a terrorist… it’s raaaaandom!” song. Stay tuned for an interview with an elderly Jewish woman who will tell you that getting her bag searched made her feel “so much safer!” Oh the futility!
(via Do You Feel Loved?)
Update: And the insanity continues…
If you’re advocating profiling (for lack of a better work) by sarcasm, then keep in mind that in London, each of the alleged terrorists were British citizens and looked very much at home traveling the underground.
If you’re lamenting the erosion of individual rights… well… you’re got a point there too.
Charles, your being a bit disingenuous by implying they were simply “British citizens”. I was originally thrown by this myself from the original news accounts, before the full truth came out …
They are “ethnically” Pakistani … and they are muslims.
This entire issue of racial profiling seems ridiculous to me. Without trying to politicize it, and it is political for some reason (most on the left cry foul when ever it’s brought up … btw, I solidly place myself left on most issues), it all boils down to statistics and common sense.
If you try and “pretend” racial/cultural profiling has no place, then you must think the insurance companies just do everything randomly too.
I mean … if you see a guy with long hair and a tie-dye, he is probably a dead-head (at least if you saw him back in 1988 … now, I don’t know) … and, if you want to go one step further, he probably has a joint in his pocket, or else knows where to get one. This is coming from an X dead-head, btw.
Come to think of it … I culturally profiled all the time back then for the purposes of scoring drugs.
Profiling (which all police officers do … whether they admit it or not) should be used to guide, not exclusively, because of course there are going to exceptions.
Look … if you can only search 1 in 3 people that get on a plane, and if in the past your planes have been hijacked 300 times, 290 times by people wearing black hats, and 10 times by people wearing red hats … you mean to tell me you are going to search red hat wearing people as much as black hat wearing people ? If so … your not much of a scientist.
Having said all that … I’m not saying it’s GOOD to racially profile. In fact it sucks. I’m just saying if you want to be realistic … this technique is statistically bound to be more successful than pure random sampling. As far as I know no 8 yo blue eyed blonde haired girls have yet to bring down a plane.
E-head, well said. And although the fact that profiling has a need is a sad fact, you can’t let people put the blame for that on the person doing the profiling. Profiles exist for a reason, and the way to change them is to change the people who have created it, not the people who observe it.
I wasn’t being disingenuous, I was simply ignorant of those facts.