A joint effort by the Pentagon and NYPD to deploy Terahertz Imagining Detection body scanners on the streets of the Big Apple is a significant step toward completion of a “Panopticon”-style prison society.
The head of the New York Police Department is working with the Pentagon to secure body scanners to be used throughout the Big Apple.
If Kelly gets his wish, the city will be receiving a whole slew of Terahertz Imagining Detection scanners, a high-tech radiation detector that measures the energy that is emitted from a persons’ body. As CBS News reports, “It measures the energy radiating from a body up to 16 feet away, and can detect anything blocking it, like a gun.”
What it can also do, however, is allow the NYPD to conduct illegal searches by means of scanning anyone walking the streets of New York. Any object on your person could be privy to the eyes of the detector, and any suspicious screens can prompt police officers to search someone on suspicion of having a gun, or anything else under their clothes.
According to Commissioner Kelly, the scanners would only be used in “reasonably suspicious circumstances,” but what constitutes “suspicious” in the eyes of the NYPD could greatly differ from what the 8 million residents of the five boroughs have in mind.
In practice, “suspicious” behavior for the NYPD consists of anything done by a young black or Hispanic male. In a New York Times op-ed, 23-year-old New York City resident Nicholas Peart describes being repeatedly detained, searched, and even thrown to the ground at gunpoint by police officers while carrying on such “suspicious” activities as attending a friend’s birthday party or going to the gym.
In 2010, Peart observes “the N.Y.P.D. recorded more than 600,000 stops; 84 percent of those stopped were blacks or Latinos. Police are far more likely to use force when stopping blacks or Latinos than whites. In half the stops police cite the vague `furtive movements’ as the reason for the stop. Maybe black and brown people just look more furtive, whatever that means.”
One reason for the proliferation of stop-and-frisk detentions is a rigid but officially disavowed quota system. Two years ago, NYPD Officer Adil Polanco exposed that system in an interview with ABC News.
“Our primary job is not to help anybody, our primary job is not to assist anybody, our primary job is to get those numbers and come back with them,” Officer Polanco lamented. Each night he and other officers were expected to make at least one arrest and issue at least twenty summonses. To document that claim, Polanco provided an audio recording of a roll call briefing at the NYPD’s 41st precinct.
“If you think 1 and 20 is breaking your balls, guess what you’re going to be doing. You’re going to be doing a lot more, a lot more than what they’re saying,” declared the Patrol Supervisor. On another occasion, the supervisor escalated the pressure, unambiguously coupling quota-based performance expectations with job security: “Next week, 25 [summonses] and one [arrest], thirty-five and one and until you decide to quit this job to go to work at a Pizza Hut, this is what you’re going to be doing till then. Do you understand?”
As a result of these arrest and citation requirements, Polanco complained, “We are stopping kids walking upstairs to their house, stopping kids going to the store, young adults. In order to keep the quota.”
In addition to eviscerating the Second, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments, and deepening the constitutionally impermissible relationship between the Pentagon and the New York Police Department, the mobile scanner scheme will inevitably lead to a spike in unnecessary police violence against innocent pedestrians triggered by “suspicious” scanner readings. The passive radiation generated by the scanners can be blocked by any opaque object – not only a gun, but also such things as cellphones or soft drink containers. This is illustrated by the case of Jordan Miles, an honor student severely beaten by Pittsburgh police who mistook a soft drink bottle for a weapon.
Two years ago, a wolf pack of police officers assigned to an undercover street unit in Pittsburgh surrounded Miles while he was walking to his grandmother’s house. Thinking they were common criminals, rather than the more dangerous government-employed variety, Miles tried to leave. He ran three steps before slipping and falling to the sidewalk, whereupon the officers attacked him with a stun gun and beat him with fists, knees, and a branch — and tore out a huge chunk of hair for good measure. (See photos of the beating victim here.)
In a criminal report the assailants claimed that the 5’6″, 150-pound viola player looked “suspicious” and appeared to be armed with a “heavy object”; the weapon in question proved to be a bottle of Mountain Dew, an admittedly deadly concoction but one that is dangerous only to those who consume the beverage. The odds are pretty good that incidents of this kind will become commonplace when the quota-driven NYPD is provided with technology that can transform any solid object into grounds for a supposedly legal detention.
