New York City is pushing a state of fear against brown people and innocent bags of hummus. Some subway ads urge people, ‘If you see something, say something.’ Others hold up filling commuter trains with German shepherds as the epitome of a safe society. And this is happening on a national scale. What we get in return is endless, paranoiac idiocy like the War on Lite-Brites:

Someone sees something, so he says something. The person he says it to — a policeman, a security guard, a flight attendant — now faces a choice: ignore or escalate… if he escalates, he’ll be praised for “doing his job” and the cost will be borne by others. So he escalates…

Someone — these are all real — notices a funny smell, or some white powder, or two people passing an envelope, or a dark-skinned man leaving boxes at the curb, or a cell phone in an airplane seat; the police cordon off the area, make arrests, and/or evacuate airplanes; and in the end the cause of the alarm is revealed as a pot of Thai chili sauce, or flour, or a utility bill, or an English professor recycling, or a cell phone in an airplane seat…

If you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn’t be surprised when you get amateur security… these incidents only reinforce the need to realistically assess, not automatically escalate, citizen tips. [Link]

I’ve phoned in NYC street crime tips, and that’s how it’s supposed to work: both citizens and dispatchers realistically evaluate the threat at every level. But once you mention terrorism, knowing a tip is probably useless, people cover their asses and spray out scare ads. And that’s how we got to the point where the intelligentsia prefer Notting Hill to NoHo, and you can’t carry your mega hold frizz control onto a plane.

In London, the cops were just found guilty of gross negligence — taking a leak when they should have been surveilling, having specialists show up for duty four and a half hours late, misidentifying a suspect — and then shooting an innocent tube rider in the head:

… a surveillance officer was “relieving himself” just as De Menezes left his home… specialist units were told they were needed at 5am but had not been in position until 9.30am. [Link]

I ran as they were shooting him. We all ran to the sound of gunshots… Jean Charles, to my knowledge, did nothing out of the ordinary at all. Like I say, it felt to me like he was somebody that had been picked on at random because he was nearest to the door. [Link]

There was a coverup, natch. The Metropolitan Police lied about the facts for days after the shooting and claimed state secrets, of course. But in the end it was just an attempt to cover their asses — just like the federal government:

As a footnote to the founding case establishing the [state secrets] privilege… the accident reports were declassified and released… it was found that the argument was fraudulent, and there was no secret information. The reports did, however, contain information about the poor state of condition of the aircraft itself, which would have been very compromising to the Air Force’s case. [Link]

Sunlight, and sanity, are the only disinfectants.

Related posts: No halal soup for you, Sniff ‘n scratch, The profiling myth, part 2, Muriel’s shredding, Banerjee wants bag search ban, Radio killed the video star, Spy vs. spy, Leaks, lies and videotape, A profile of cognitive dissonance, The profiling myth, Why he ran, Pointing the finger, Rashomon on the tube (updated again)