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While Turner Broadcasting may have gotten a cheap deal for only having to pay $2 million and sacrifice one guy in a suit over the Mooninite Invasion, the over-the-top response from the local authorities is a laughable reminder of a very un-laughable situation that affects a number of major American cities in a very sinister and threatening way: superficial and overblown public security measures that in practice offer almost no real security but transform public life into a series of intimidating encounters that violate the very nature of a free society.
First, just so we're all on the same page, a short lesson I found online the other day: this Flash animation very simply and elegantly explains the whole philosophy of liberty. It's several minutes long, and gets a bit preachy at the end, but for those of you who find philosophy a little thick, this lays out the central ideas plainly. Among them, the one most pertinent to this conversation is the idea that the threat of force or violence to coerce proscribed behavior is inimical to a free society.
Writing at 3QuarksDaily, Michael Blim takes on the intimidation used by the MBTA Police in the form of random bag searches. Though it took a couple of false starts for the MBTA Police to actually mplement the searches as regular policy, it has been in place now for a couple of years. The MBTA Police do not always pay much attention to the policy themselves, but every once in a while something (like bogus LED signs all over the city) jostles them back to attention and they make more of a show of doing some searches.
As Blim points out, in the last quarter of 2006, the MBTA Police detained 2500 people for random searches. Absolutely none of them turned out to have anything remotely dangerous or illegal, and only 27 of them even set off what would turn out to be false positives from their explosive sniffing dogs and machines. There are approximately 1.2 MILLION riders on the various MBTA trains and buses every single day. The MBTA cops stopped 2500 people out of a total possible number of 98.4 million riders in an 82-day period. That's 0.002% of the total ridership. As the Massachusetts ACLU notes, that is an "infinitesimally small" number of searches.
In other words, it's a joke. A complete waste of time and a complete waste of money. Barring the statistical "one-in-a-million" scenario (which they would have to score EVERY SINGLE DAY to be meaningful), there's no way these searches are the slightest bit effective.
So what's the real effect of the presence of the cops and the dogs and the bomb-sniffing machines? Intimidation. Whereas the presence of police obviously on patrol for routine criminal activity can indeed provide some deterrent, these police are not on routine patrol. Their job is to consider each and every person on the subways, buses, and commuter trains as suspect. And because their task is done overtly, the glare of suspicion introduces the element of intimidation into the public space.
Let me quote Blim directly, because he says this well:
Further the court seems unaware of the fear such tactics create in ordinary persons feel when they find cops in their face unexpectedly, dressed in black and equipped with guns, a machine, and a dog, and demanding that they surrender their bags.
Let's be clear -- the fear or expectation of violence or punishment is absolutely equivalent to the violence or punishment itself. Don't agree with me? Ask Dick Cheney or Attorney General Alberto Gonzales about the validity of torture. The threat of torture alone is considered a torturous act in international law. While random bag searches do not reach the same threat level on their own, consider that you can be arrested and detained indefinitely without benefit of counsel or contact with anyone on practically any grounds of suspicion deemed appropriate. And, as Blim points out, the federal courts have ruled that the state has complete and total discretion to determine any action as a threat to itself, trumping the rights of the individual.
Now let's consider that "philosophy of liberty" piece again, shall we? If you accept the premises of this short lesson as valid, then there's no way the current MBTA policies, or any of the other "for show" efforts established by public safety agencies in Boston, New York, London, or anywhere else are in any way tolerable in a free society.
And yet they persist, are given legitimacy by the courts, are aggressively pursued by all levels of government and receive a degree of public support from some quarters of society. In short, we have breached the free society as it was imagined and put into practice for more than 200 years and all we have to show for it is fear itself.
© BrianKaneOnline.com 2000-2007