NY ACLU sues over NY subway searches

NYCLU sues city over subway searches
   
BY JOSHUA ROBIN and DAN JANISON
STAFF WRITERS

August 4, 2005

The New York Civil Liberties Union will file suit against the city Thursday to keep police from searching the bags of passengers entering the subway, organization lawyers said.

The suit, which will be filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, will claim that the two-week old policy violates constitutional guarantees of equal protection and prohibitions against unlawful searches and seizures, while doing almost nothing to shield the city from terrorism.

It argues that the measure also allows the possibility for racial profiling, even though officers are ordered to randomly screen passengers.

"While concerns about terrorism of course justify -- indeed, require -- aggressive police tactics, those concerns cannot justify the Police Department\'s unprecedented policy of subjecting millions of innocent people to suspicionless searches," states the suit, a partial copy of which was provided to Newsday.

Names of the plaintiffs -- subway riders who object to the searches -- were redacted in the copy, but are expected to be released Thursday morning.

A city Law Department spokeswoman said that since officials had not yet received the suit, she could not yet comment.

The city is named as a defendant, along with the police department and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.

Thursday, before the suit was released, Kelly said that the searches were "just one more layer, one more tool."

"No one thinks that will be the solution, but it does give a potential terrorist something more to think about," he said.

The civil liberties union has criticized the searches as over-reaching since Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the measure on July 21, after terrorists targeted London\'s mass transit system for the second time in two weeks. It also calls the stops ineffective because terrorists can walk through entrances where police are not screening.

The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the right of law enforcement to conduct random searches, said Barry Kamins, a professor of criminal procedure at Fordham and Brooklyn law schools. But it found that those checks can be considered unlawful if their primary purpose is for law enforcement, such as searching for evidence of a crime. Rather, police must use the stops chiefly to preserve public safety, he said.

The suit comes as elected officials continue to tussled over racial profiling. Nine City Council members Thursday asked Bloomberg to direct officers to note the racial or ethnic identity of people searched.

The call came after a city councilman and a state assemblyman suggested young Arabs should be targeted for searches to prevent terror attacks.

Robert Lawson, a Bloomberg spokesman, said that the police already have adequate safeguards. "The mayor has repeatedly stated since the start of this policy that there would be zero tolerance for racial profiling," Lawson added.


http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/crime/nyc-suit0804,0,646390,print.story?coll=nyc-homepage-breaking2

What a waste of taxpayer money.

The ACLU..

.....

Ugh, I can\'t think of anything horrible enough to say about them. Use your imagination, folks.

Originally posted by Blade
The ACLU..

.....

Ugh, I can\'t think of anything horrible enough to say about them. Use your imagination, folks.

Why? What\'s wrong with them?

[videoholic]

THese people need to get over it.  If stopping for 10 seconds and letting someone see that I\'m not carrying a bomb deters people from blowing me up, then I\'m all for it.

[GmanJoe]

Originally posted by Ghettomath
Why? What\'s wrong with them?

Lots of things. Even some liberals get rubbed the wrong way by them.

To be fair this article by CATO Institute pretty much agrees with NYCLU.  CATO is viewed as conservative, but in truth they hold more libertarian views.

 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4019

I agree with CATO on one issue and that is "random searches" do nothing to make people safer other than making them feel safe.  What I disagree with is their stance on not performing searches.  Instead of random searches they should profile in this case and search those who fit a certain profile.

Also what makes CATO not as bad as the ACLU is that the ACLU loves to go to court and waste people\'s time and money.  There are many things wrong with the ACLU, but one really only need look at their founders to see that they do have an agenda despite what they would have Americans believe.  Their founders had an agenda which was to make the US a communist society - today it is to make it a socialist one.

The ACLU was founded by Roger Baldwin, Crystal Eastman, Albert DeSilver and others in 1920. We are nonprofit and nonpartisan and have grown from a roomful of civil liberties activists to an organization of nearly 400,000 members and supporters. We handle nearly 6,000 court cases annually from our offices in almost every state.

Now take a closer look at Roger Baldwin:

A Direct quote of Roger Baldwin\'s....

"I am for socialism, disarmament, and ultimately for abolishing the State itself as an instrument for violence and compulsion. I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class and sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal"

Roger Baldwin, described the Soviet Union as a "great laboratory of social experimentation of incalculable value to the development of the world." He wanted to bring socialism to America, but he knew that to be effective, he had to disguise and mask this goal in terms of individual rights. He wrote: "Do steer away from making it look like a socialist enterprise. We want to look like patriots in everything we do. We want to get a good lot of flags, talk a good deal about the Constitution and what our forefathers wanted to make of the country, and to show that we are really the folks that really stand for the spirit of our institutions." (Quoted in William A. Donahue, Twilight of Liberty: The Legacy of the ACLU - New Brunswick, NJ: Transition Publishers, 1944, pp.6-7)

Another founding member...

"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it  happened".
 

--Norman Thomas, Socialist Party presidential candidate and one of the founders of the ACLU---

Lastly...

The head of the ACLU is Anthony Romero who took over leadership in 2001. Romero is described on the ACLU web site as an "openly gay" man. He formerly worked for the Ford Foundation where he funneled $90 million to leftist causes including anti-war, pro-abortion, homosexual, immigration reform, and feminist organizations.

Now I could care less about him being gay or pro abortion, but it this does show that the ACLU has not strayed far from its roots.

Giga,  do you have a link to that text you copied regarding the ACLU bios?

Which ones?  The first one is out of a book that is cited at the end of the paragraph and the second can be found anywhere on the internet.

[videoholic]

I checked http://www.baby.com and they had nothing.

Let\'s consider the Wikipedia entry on Roger Baldwin:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Nash_Baldwin

was a noted civil libertarian, pacifist, and left-wing social activist who held Communist views in his youth.

...

In St. Louis, Baldwin was also greatly influenced by the radical social movement of the anarchist Emma Goldman; he joined the Industrial Workers of the World, and developed a lasting sympathy for the Soviet Union and Communism that lasted until 1939, when he was disillusioned by the Nazi-Soviet pact and broke off all radical ties.

He was born in 1884, well before the Bolshevik revolution, and before all real world demonstrations of the faults of a communist system.  Yet you Giga seem to think that this taints Baldwin\'s entire life, and the history of an organization that is now 85 years old.  I guess that\'s to be expected since you see "Communism" as the ultimate boogy man.  You need only brand something "communist" whether truthfully or not, and you can safely dismiss it.  We don\'t all operate with right wing blinders like you do Giga.

BTW, it\'s interesting how you love to attack other posts by attempting to discredit the source of the information, yet in your own posts you don\'t even bother to cite the source.  You just say "it\'s available everywhere on the internet" when in fact it is only available on biased right wing websites that must be carefully picked out from the greater volume of mainstream sites in a typical search results page.  I guess we can\'t be trusted to evaluate your sources, Giga?  You\'ve already evaluated them for us an given them the Giga stamp of approval.  

Right wing hatred for the ACLU is nothing more than a ridiculous shared neurosis.  Most wingers who claim to hate the ACLU don\'t even know why.  They just know their higher-ups have said they\'re supposed to hate them.  Just like so much of the rest of conservative agenda.  Don\'t bother to think for yourself, just repeat what Trent Lott or Bill Frist says.

Originally posted by Coredweller
Let\'s consider the Wikipedia entry on Roger Baldwin:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Nash_Baldwin
He was born in 1884, well before the Bolshevik revolution, and before all real world demonstrations of the faults of a communist system.  Yet you Giga seem to think that this taints Baldwin\'s entire life, and the history of an organization that is now 85 years old.  I guess that\'s to be expected since you see "Communism" as the ultimate boogy man.  You need only brand something "communist" whether truthfully or not, and you can safely dismiss it.  We don\'t all operate with right wing blinders like you do Giga.

[/b]

Are you denying he was a Communist?  Are you denying he had a socialist agenda which has nothing to do with "defending civil libertites".  This is exactly what the ACLU does today - it defends what it considers important - what it does not do is defend equally.  Wikipedia is an encyclopedia made up of people who use the internet.  I can go edit his entry right now to include the quote.  Please do me a favor and don\'t list Wikipedia as an unbiased source of anything.

Originally posted by Coredweller
BTW, it\'s interesting how you love to attack other posts by attempting to discredit the source of the information, yet in your own posts you don\'t even bother to cite the source.  You just say "it\'s available everywhere on the internet" when in fact it is only available on biased right wing websites that must be carefully picked out from the greater volume of mainstream sites in a typical search results page.  I guess we can\'t be trusted to evaluate your sources, Giga?  You\'ve already evaluated them for us an given them the Giga stamp of approval.  

[/b]

Google it Core.  It is not that hard and the quote is true.  I love how you are trying to somehow revise history by trying to insinuate that because it is highly publicized on right wing sites weakens the fact that he did make the statement.  What you consider mainstream is a joke...

Originally posted by Coredweller
Right wing hatred for the ACLU is nothing more than a ridiculous shared neurosis.  Most wingers who claim to hate the ACLU don\'t even know why.  They just know their higher-ups have said they\'re supposed to hate them.  Just like so much of the rest of conservative agenda.  Don\'t bother to think for yourself, just repeat what Trent Lott or Bill Frist says.

Oh but here is where you are wrong.  Quite a few liberals don\'t like the ACLU either because they know exactly what it stands for.  Frankly, I am surprised someone such as you doesn\'t see them for what they are - a socialist group with an agenda to fight whatever they hate - ie. Christians, anything that leans politically right, etc.

The ACLU knows best...

San Diegans vote to save cross
75% resist ACLU effort to remove historic structure

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: July 27, 2005
12:44 a.m. Eastern



© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com



Mt. Soledad cross and veterans memorial above San Diego (soledadmemorial.com)
After 15 years of adverse court rulings, the citizens of San Diego voted to save the city\'s historic Mt. Soledad cross.

The conflict arises from an ACLU lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the 29-foot concrete structure, which has been the center of a war memorial on city land since 1954.


According to an unofficial count, 75 percent of voters decided they want to transfer the city owned site to the federal government where it would be designated as a war memorial.

The Thomas More Law Center, a national public interest law firm, provided legal analysis that formed the basis for a federal law that declared the cross and memorial as a National War Memorial and authorized the federal government to receive a donation of the land.

A bill authorizing the federal government to take over the memorial was authored by Republican U.S. congressmen Duncan Hunter and Randy Cunningham. President Bush signed the bill into law in December.

The ballot initiative came about after the city refused to donate the cross and memorial to the federal government. A group called San Diegans for the Mount Soledad National War Memorial took just 23 days to gather 105,000 signatures.

"This is a tremendous victory in an important battle, but the war is not over," said Richard Thompson, the center\'s president and chief counsel. "The other side has not surrendered; court battles over the cross continue."

Two court dates are scheduled within the next month. A federal judge will hear arguments over the cross Aug. 15, and a state superior court judge will hear arguments on the constitutionality of the ballot measure Aug. 12.

Joshua Gross, a spokesman for San Diegans for the Mount Soledad National War Memorial, believes the ballot result could influence the judges.

"A judge is always going to be inclined to follow the will of the people, the will of the voters," Gross said. "The higher that number, the more inclined they\'ll be. That\'s just logical."

But ACLU attorney James McElroy insists the vote is meaningless.

"It still doesn\'t mean a damn thing," he said, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. "Voters should have never voted on it. It\'s a waste of taxpayers\' money."

The battle began in 1989 when Phillip Paulsen, an atheist, filed suit, and a court ordered the city to remove the cross. San Diego responded by placing the property up for sale, with the approval of 76 percent of voters. But the subsequent sale was ruled unconstitutional after Paulsen objected, arguing the sale had the effect of preserving the cross.

Paulsen argues that the cross is a violation of the First Amendment\'s ban on government establishment of a religion

In 1998, the city sold the property to the Mt. Soledad War Memorial Association, which again was challenged in court. The sale originally was upheld but later ruled unconstitutional by the full panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco and remanded back to district court to work out a remedy.

During its brief period of ownership, the Memorial Association made significant improvements, including extensive landscaping and the addition of more than 3,000 plaques honoring military veterans.



Isn\'t this a democracy?  Since when does the opinion of the people not "mean a damn thing"?  This is why liberals/progressives will never win the mainstream over - they think they know what is best for everyone and that is according to what their beliefs are.  Of course us mainstream folks are too stupid for vote the right way on things like this and the presidential election right?  :rolleyes:

The ACLU and people who think like them need to take a reality check - they are not the mainstream or even remotely in touch with it.

I don\'t agree with 80% of the shit the ACLU does but they are a necessary evil and that 20% percent that I do agree with makes me appreciate their efforts.