Bloomberg: Your Apologies Are Worthless

As evidence of our new found police state in NYC, stories are now circulating about the tour bus raid Sunday by the NYPD. To summarize, a Gray Line bus supervisor called police claiming that there were 5 suspicious men boarding a double decker sightseeing bus who had backpacks and all purchased their tickets in advance. So police raided the bus, detained all 60 passengers for 90 minutes, including handcuffing the 5 men indicated by the supervisor.

However, the men had no backpacks. The Gray Line supervisor seemingly lied to the police because his only real suspicion was that the men were South Asian. Publicly the Mayor and the NYPD have insisted that transit searches would be randomly selected to avoid racial profiling. However this supervisor committed this exact act of racism when contacting the police.

And here's the problem: your words do not match your actions. The FBI Most Wanted Terrorists, linked on the NYPD home page, is almost exclusively brown-skinned men. We are constantly told to report "suspicious" activity to the authorities, without ever defining the term. So when untrained citizens start spying on their neighbors, they are insensitive to race and will automatically finger the profile they see on TV or read in the paper.

This is unacceptable. Mayor Bloomberg, you are responsible for all of NYC's inhabitants, regardless of their race or creed. Mr. Bloomberg, frankly your apologies are meaningless; empty words will not restore my faith that this is a one time incident. In fact this will systematically continue to occur unless the racist undertones are removed from your publications, posters, and the mainstream news. It will continue because citizens aren't trained to spot criminal activity and human nature so quickly reverts to tribalistic, "us vs them" behavior.

Mayor Bloomberg, perhaps you need to reevaluate how the NYPD responds to these sorts of issues because most suspicious calls will turn up nothing and no one should feel intimidated to go about their business in the City.