October 31, 2005
Florida Judge Shockingly Halts Security Searches at NFL Games
By Joel Mowbray
Less than a month after a 21-year-old blew himself up just outside
a packed football stadium in Oklahoma, a circuit court judge in
Florida has granted the American Civil Liberties Union a surprise
victory by issuing a preliminary injunction preventing searches
at Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ games.
Spurred to
action by the July 7 London bombings, the NFL this August mandated
that all teams begin “pat-down” searches of ticket
holders starting on September 25. Many teams had been doing so
since 9/11, though the Bucs had not. The timing of the policy’s
implementation turned out to be, at the least, eerie.
Less than
a week after the NFL began league-wide pat-downs, college student
Joel Hinrichs III blew himself up roughly 100 yards outside the
University of Oklahoma football stadium, which was overflowing
with some 84,000 fans. While it is not clear whether he intended
to commit a terrorist attack, the mere fact that he had tried
to purchase, only days earlier, ammonium nitrate—which was
used by Timothy McVeigh in 1996—would seem to show that
the NFL was acting with reasonable caution.
With that
backdrop, high school civics teacher and Bucs’ season ticket
holder Gordon Johnston—backed by the Florida ACLU—filed
suit against the Bucs on October 13, arguing that “suspicionless”
searches by stadium security would violate his constitutional
rights.
Employing
laughably flawed logic, Johnston, among other things, argued,
“Why do I need to lose my rights to go to a game? It’s
humiliating. If I did that to my students do you know what would
happen to me?”
The difference,
of course, is that high school classrooms, as yet, are not seen
as attractive targets for terrorists. And each person in his class
is almost certainly a known quantity, which obviously cannot be
said about each of the tens of thousands who attend any given
football game.
As paraphrased
by the Associated Press, the high school civics teacher
further argued, “Security would be more effective if staff
spent more time watching ticket holders and less time touching
them.” Why is it, then, that even highly trained Israeli
security and military personnel have not always been able to visually
detect the presence of suicide vests underneath bombers’
clothes?
The ACLU’s
strongest argument was that the NFL instituted its pat-down policy
absent any specific threat. Yet terrorist attacks rarely occur
after authorities have learned of a specific threat. The London
bombings, notably, came less than a week after British officials
had lowered the threat level. 9/11, as everyone now knows, caught
intelligence officials flat-footed, having never imagined the
possibility of hijacked planes being flown into buildings.
If anything,
terror attacks are least likely to occur after authorities learn
of a specific threat. Increased, visible security efforts are
known to have deterred more than one attack, including one targeting
the Brooklyn Bridge. In fact, though it is impossible to know
for sure since it is not the sort of thing officials would admit,
it appears that none of the post-9/11 terror attacks (outside
Israel) had been predicted by specific threats received by law
enforcement beforehand.
Ironically,
not far from the courthouse where Judge Perry Little issued his
ruling last week halting security searches is the ongoing terrorism
trial of alleged Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) higher-up Sami
al-Arian. (In the “it’s a small world, after all”
category, Judge Little dismissed a civil suit brought against
al-Arian in 2002 by investigative journalist and former prosecutor
John Loftus.)
PIJ, of course,
is one of the world’s leaders in suicide bombings—precisely
the kind of attack the NFL policy is aimed at thwarting. And al-Arian
is only one of the terror arrests that have been made since 9/11
in the sunshine state. Before then, a number of the Sept. 11 hijackers
spent time in Florida.
What, then,
did Judge Little make of the threat posed by the substantial,
ongoing presence of suspected terrorists within a few hours drive
of the Tampa stadium? Apparently, not much. His ruling was a preliminary
injunction, which can only be granted if the judge believes there’s
a good chance that the plaintiff will win at trial.
Assuming
Judge Little continues siding with the ACLU and strikes down searches
as unconstitutional, it is a safe bet that the Tampa Sports Authority,
which operates the stadium, will appeal.
Even if the
prohibition on pat-downs is somehow upheld, the TSA could follow
the lead of the Cincinnati Bengals, which only implemented the
new policy after the team agreed to pick up the tab for the increased
security—which would arguably make the searches private,
and not public, action. Then again, few experts had predicted
the ACLU’s suit would prevail.
In the meantime,
it seems that fans attending the next Bucs’ home game this
Sunday will be able to walk past security without any sort of
pat-down search. This might spare Johnston “humiliation,”
but is it likely to make any of the 65,000-plus other fans in
attendance any safer?
