The 2nd and 4th Amendment mean nothing in New York City

NY Street Scanners Looking For Guns

February 8, 2012 by Bob Livingston

The 2^nd and 4^th Amendment apparently has little meaning for New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.

Kelly is working with the Pentagon to deploy Terahertz Imagining Detection (TID) scanners throughout the city. TID scanners measure radiation energy emitted from a person’s body and can detect when the radiation is being blocked. Hence, it would spot a concealed weapon.

This allows the New York Police Department to conduct illegal searches of anyone walking down the street. If an officer sees an anomaly, he can then conduct a more formal search… all without probable cause or a warrant. Donna Lieberman of the New York Civil Liberties Union told CBS the scans subjected everyone to a virtual pat down.

Of course, liberty means little to the people of New York. In the first quarter of 2011, NYPD conducted street interrogations of more than 161,000 innocent New Yorkers. Of those, 84 percent were either black or Latinos. Figures released last May showed that of 180,000 stop-and-frisk encounters reported by the police department, 88 percent of them ended in neither an arrest nor a summons.

At first glance, it seems ironic that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg would go along with Kelly on this endeavor. After all, Bloomberg is a big nanny-stater. He claims to be looking out for people’s health when he seeks to ban food stamp users from buying soda and sugary drinks, when he wants to reduce the consumption of salt and when he bans trans fat in restaurant food.

But the TID scanners emit THz waves that, “unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication,” according to a report by MIT.

Obviously, Bloomberg — one of the founders of Mayors Against Illegal Guns — cares more about control than health. But what does it say about New Yorkers that they tolerate such totalitarianism?
Not content to confine his tyranny to New York City, Bloomberg has announced he’s going after Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints website KSL.com over its classified section, which sells guns. Apparently, Bloomberg needs a geography lesson as well as a lesson on the U.S. Constitution.