One of the problems with a free society is that the freedom also leaves openings for bad people to do bad things. If you take away enough freedoms to be able to control the bad people, you no longer have a free society. Consequently, one of the prices of a free society is a certain amount of risk. There is nothing our government can do to stop an extremist, willing to commit suicide, from committing an act of terrorism. The problem is that our government can never admit this, so they put on a show to make us feel safe and secure. Just like the National Guardsmen standing around Penn Station, this is exactly what the random bag search is, a show to make us feel better.
The fact that it’s a random search is problematic on several levels. Statistically, a one-in-five search (or whatever the parameter) is doomed to fail. For every one bag searched, four get through. On a crowded station platform, the odds worsen. More importantly, a random search, without any suspicion of wrongdoing is fundamentally at odds with our constitutional guarantee of privacy. Courts throughout the country have held that when police search a person, there must be “individualized suspicion”.
To give the police this type of discretion invites profiling and other abuses (the guy murdered in London, or the NYC cop collecting drivers license info the other day). Let’s be honest here, the NJT Police have screwed up their harassing of photographers (challenging them on public, non-railroad property), can they really be trusted to handle an assignment as sensitive and volatile as this?
Others on this board have correctly pointed out another shortcoming. If a person does indeed have a bomb and is stopped, he refuses to be searched and is turned away. He merely goes to another station or to a nearby public gathering spot to detonate; or he detonates at the random checkpoint. It doesn’t matter to him where he detonates, as long as he does with lots of people nearby.
Another important question to be asked is where does it stop? Will the government next want random searches on public sidewalks or in crowded malls? Lots of potential victims there you know. Or will they next want to have random, warrant-less searches of houses, because that’s where the London bombs were made. Or how bout rounding up all people of Middle Eastern or South Asian heritage and lock them up or deport them?
A little dramatic, yes. But not that farfetched.