CivicActions

The student in Boston was arrested and according to police almost shot, for wearing homemade flashing-light jewelry, which is even made commercially these days. No terrorist would make a bomb with flashing lights on it; has any ever done so, even once, anywhere in the world? Yet AP captioned a video, "MIT student says fake bomb was art work." How did it ever become a fake bomb or a hoax? Her crime was simply being different, attracting attention at an airport in any way.

In other words, the only real way to protect yourself is to be as much like everyone else as possible. It's not enough to avoid reasonable suspicion. This wasn't reasonable suspicion, just being different, and the cops and media seem quite happy with attacking her anyway.

Last Christmas morning I saw a black woman almost arrested by white cops at Philadelphia's main train station, for talking too loudly into a cell phone while dealing with what she said was a family emergency. I was 20 feet away and never aware of the phone call; one of the cops told her that her offense was talking too loudly and disturbing people. She worked hard on convincing the cops that she meant no disrespect to them personally, and they let her go. A few years ago somebody was shot dead in that station, apparently for being drunk or crazy and disputing an order to leave.

These incidents had nothing to do with terrorism -- and the case of the student attacked in Florida even less, as it did not take place in an airport or train station. The message there was that free speech is not OK.

Somebody or some group flagged that YouTube video as "inappropriate" -- so viewers must register with YouTube to see it. It hardly looked sexual. And official violence is standard entertainment for kids in commercial movies and TV. So the "inappropriate" must have referred to its political content. It's inappropriate to show free speech being stifled; that must be censored in the name of maintaining public illusions of free speech.

A basic problem is that the U.S. has thousands of cops whose main purpose in their career is to stop terrorism -- and the great majority of them will never see an actual terrorist in their entire lifetime, and may never contribute to stopping an attack. Yet they are taught to be on hair-trigger alert, to act first without waiting to understand the situation.

If anyone argues that police cannot be expected to be smart, well, that's a policy too. Some years ago there was a news story about a police recruit rejected for having too high an IQ. It appeared that this was standard, intended policy, and the case was unusual only for making the papers.

Many law-enforcement people, including all the airport security staff I've dealt with, were able to do their jobs while fully respecting citizens who were almost certainly completely innocent of anything to do with terrorism. But clearly some are not.

We do need security against that one real terrorist in 100,000 or a million or more. Throughout all of human history before 911, the people law-enforcement dealt with were much more likely to be criminals than is the case in security today, after a few terrorists showed how much harm they could do. Maybe security training and standards should include more about dealing with the 99.999+% of people the officers interact with professionally who have nothing whatever to do with terrorism.

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John S James
www.smart-accounts.org