Woman charged for refusing to show ID on a public bus
I've been profiled on more than one occasion.
One time, it was because of how I looked (bearded and swarthy) and where I was standing (a few feet away from the President of the United States). When the authorities asked me to please, slowly remove my hands from my pockets NOW, I obeyed. I'm no dummy.
Did it bother me? No. Did I nearly pop a blood vessel? You bet -- but not because I felt my rights were being violated.
I've had other, similar, run-ins. No others involved the Secret Service.
[pause]
Well, there was that time I got pulled over by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Ottowa after leaving the scene of a crime. This is a true story. Apparently the Turkish military attache had been assassinated by the Armenian Secret Liberation Army and I, um, happened on his body a couple of moments after it happened. Honest! And I didn't see who did it -- you have to believe me!
Again, did I resent being stopped and questioned? Of course not. I know that there were some pretty good reasons why I was in the spotlight -- usually because of how I looked and/or where I was at a certain point in time. Is it my fault that I looked like Carlos the Jackal? No. Well, I did have a full, black, bushy beard, which (in a weird cosmic coincidence) I shaved off shortly before 9/11. Otherwise -- who knows? -- I might have been arrested by "Crazy John" Ashcroft and accused of being the 20th hijacker.
I understand (and appreciate) law enforcement actively trying to stop terrorism by looking for people who, well, fit the description. Does that mean all swarthy Mediterranean types are terrorists? No, of course not. But the preponderence of actual terrorists are swarthy Mediterranean types. It's what makes my life so interesting.
What's the solution? I don't know. But I do know that what happened Deborah Davis only makes things worse, not better:
She's a 50 year-old mother of four who lives and works in Denver, Colorado. Her kids are all grown-up: her middle son is a soldier fighting in Iraq. She leads an ordinary, middle class life. You probably never would have heard of Deb Davis if it weren't for her belief in the U.S. Constitution.I shudder to think what will happen if and when the ACLU succeeds in bringing it to the SCOTUS, given Judge "French Fry" Roberts propensity for strict constructionism.One morning in late September 2005, Deb was riding the public bus to work. She was minding her own business, reading a book and planning for work, when a security guard got on this public bus and demanded that every passenger show their ID. Deb, having done nothing wrong, declined. The guard called in federal cops, and she was arrested and charged with federal criminal misdemeanors after refusing to show ID on demand.
On the 9th of December 2005, Deborah Davis will be arraigned in U.S. District Court in a case that will determine whether Deb and the rest of us live in a free society, or in a country where we must show "papers" whenever a cop demands them.
Guess what, she's gonna lose.
It's not so much that we are growing more and more authoritarian and even fascist every day (we are), but we live in a fearful nation. 9/11 didn't make that happen, it only illuminated the phenomenon.
I've been reading Imperial Ambitions by Noam Chomsky, who has been talking about the Culture of Fear, and the ways it is exploited, for years.
The key question, a jury quesiton, will be whether the request for her to present her "papers" was reasonable under the circumstances. The more frightened a people become, the less reasonable they are when it comes to their willingness to exchange liberty for security.
Just think how scared the average German was in the 1930's and then you have an inkling why a Hitler can happen. Defeated and humiliated, their economy in the toilet and the fear of not being able to provide a decent life for their families was palpable. Surrounded by a beligerant, gloating and hostile France on one border, and in the east a looming monster in the USSR -- an unstable, militaristic, communist dictatorship just waiting to pounce, or so the towntrodden middle class German was led to believe.
WWII was in many ways a direct result of the culture of fear prevelant in depression ravaged / between the wars Germany. The paranoid idea that all the world was against them became a self-fulfilling prophecy.