Editorial: Dilemma — Rights versus safety

Sunday, Nov. 6, 2005 | 8:19 a.m.

Government officials trying to protect the public from acts of terrorism can find themselves in the proverbial "damned if we do, damned if we don't" predicament. A good example is being played out now in a New York City courtroom.

On July 21 the New York Police Department began a new policy of having officers randomly stop people about to enter subways. The purpose was to conduct searches of any packages or bags people were carrying. The reason was the terrorist bombings of a bus and three subway trains two weeks earlier in London. More than 50 people were killed and more than 700 were injured.

Employing their knowledge of the tactics used by terrorists, who tend to case targets for months in order to have precise knowledge of routines, top NYPD officials decided to add unpredictability to the daily schedules of subways. They felt that random searches would frustrate terrorists looking to pull off a similar attack in their city.

Enter the New York state affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union. Preparatory to a legal challenge, the group distributed a survey to subway users that requested them to fill it out if they had been searched. Very quickly it had five people willing to testify that the police searches had violated their constitutional rights. An ACLU lawsuit was filed against the police and a trial began Monday.

Compare this scenario with a Manhattan jury's Oct. 26 ruling. It found that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned the World Trade Center, was liable for the terrorist bombing that occurred at the building's parking lot in 1993, killing six people and injuring more than a thousand. The jury reasoned that the Port Authority should have taken protective measures after a 1985 report, written by its own security officials, cited the garage as being vulnerable to a terrorist attack.

The Port Authority was found liable for not taking security precautions, and the NYPD got sued for the opposite reason. Such irony is inevitable in this country, whose judicial system is sworn to uphold the Constitution and whose people are free to challenge any actions or decisions threatening it. We want to be safe, but we want to be free, too.

Ultimately, we look to our U.S. Supreme Court to find the happy medium in these difficult cases. In the meantime, we believe the scanning technology that has proven effective -- and constitutional -- at airports should be installed for random use at other mass transit hubs, such as subways.