Reply to Lisle: No, I’m not in jail, and in all honesty, nothing happened last week. I sent the note from my cell phone for the coolness factor, intending to follow up later in the day. When the incident took place, I was on my way to meet my boss to drive to New Rochelle for the 2005 New England Endeavor User Group meeting.
At any rate, the NYPD had six huge police officers stationed at the 63rd Drive subway stop in Queens that morning, and were basically searching anyone who a) had a backpack or briefcase and b) had a swarthy, sweaty, ("foreign") suspicious look to them, and I apparently qualified. Lots of white and Asian guys were walking through the turnstyles and going down to the platform, but not us olive skin types. And that neighborhood has tons of south Asians (Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, etc.) so the traffic was slow. I was surprised mostly because while I’ve been kicked out of places of business and had police stop me for being White before, I’ve never had it happen in NYC. For the record, neither my wife nor my sister were at all surprised–to them it was a matter of time before I got picked up for something. (But the NYPD does NOT racially profile. Really.)
Yesterday, I walked out of the 103rd Street stop on the 6 train in Manhattan so se another trio of gigantic NYPD cops ready to pull off any suspcious ("swarthy, sweaty Jews") characters off to the side to have their bag searched, but they ignored my that time. Maybe they weren’t interested in people coming out of the train, or maybe they figured seatrching a white guy in a blavk/hispanic neighborhood made no sense. I can’t figure it out, myself. But then I didn’t vote form Bloomberg and am not a NYPD cop.
You tax dollars at work, y’all.
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