A desi immigrant rights activist is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging pseudorandom bag searches on the NYC subway. 
The trial began yesterday:
Partha Banerjee… fears he will be wrongly targeted, regardless of an NYPD policy prohibiting racial profiling. “I came from India 20 years ago, yet immigrants like me are seen as an enemy,” he said. [Link]Christopher Dunn, the civil liberties union’s top lawyer in the case, said, “The only people being searched under this program are innocent New Yorkers.” The searches have not uncovered any terrorist plot, or even contraband… A third plaintiff, Partha Banerjee, said he had felt humiliated when his bag was searched at a political rally several years ago. [Link]
Mr. Banerjee was searched under the subway search policy on October 7, 2005… Mr. Banerjee objects to the subway search policy because under it, the decision to search someone is not founded on criminal suspicion. In addition, he fears that police officers could unlawfully interrogate and detain him because of written [political] materials in his bag that they might find objectionable and is concerned that he may be targeted to be searched because of his dark eyes and skin and his beard. [Link]
The government’s argument:
Gail Donoghue, the city’s lead lawyer in the case, said the searches were part of a rational strategy calculated to “keep terrorist planning and operations off balance.” By adding an element of unpredictability, she said, the policy “effectively hardens New York City targets and drives terrorist planning elsewhere.” [Link]
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p>The NYCLU’s argument seems potentially contradictory unless made fairly specific. On one hand, they’re arguing the searches are ineffective because the police use a numerical formula instead of individualized suspicion. On the other, Banerjee is worried about being singled out due to race. You can certainly reconcile these arguments (the police criteria could be a hybrid of numerical plus race, and race isn’t individual suspicion), but the NYT story isn’t granular enough to say whether they’ve done so.
The case is Brendan MacWade v. Raymond Kelly in the U.S. District Court, Southern New York. Banerjee is the executive director of the New Jersey Immigration Policy Network. Here’s his home page.
Living in NYC, I can tell you, those cops can be ruthless in searching your bag. While I don’t really mind the fact they are searching my bag, what perturbs me is the fact that some times it doesn’t seem all to “random“. Maybe its just me…