Gregory Kane: Nothing reasonable about random searches By: Gregory Kane Examiner Staff Writer March 25, 2010 Read more at the Washington Examiner: h

What's "reasonable" about a random search?

That's the question I sent by text message to a young lady who kind of drafted me to be her mentor. I was sitting at a gate in BWI-Marshall Airport, waiting to take a flight first to Philadelphia, and then on to Toronto. I had just undergone at least my third "random" search at an airport.

I had to step inside some type of funny booth and hold my hands in front of me. Then I had to hold them up high with my palms outward. The process didn't take too long, but while it lasted the one thought running through my mind was: "This seems so anti-Fourth Amendment."

That's why I sent the text message. And the question isn't a rhetorical one.

What, exactly, is reasonable about a random search? The Fourth Amendment says this:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, homes, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

No, the founding fathers didn't italicize the word "unreasonable" in the original document, but perhaps they should have. There is nothing about a random search that even remotely satisfies the criteria of any portion of the Fourth Amendment.

When airport personnel pull somebody over for a random search, there's no "probable cause" involved. There's not even a "reasonable suspicion" -- the criteria for what is called a "Terry stop" -- that the person being searched has either committed a crime or is about to commit one.

The term "Terry stop" comes from a 1968 Supreme Court case in which eight justices -- on the ultraliberal "Warren Court," no less -- ruled that police stop-and-frisk tactics were constitutional. Here's how part of the decision reads, written by ultraliberal Chief Justice Earl Warren himself:

"[W]here a police officer observes unusual conduct which leads him reasonably to conclude in light of his experience that criminal activity may be afoot and that the person with whom he is dealing may be armed and presently dangerous, where in the course of investigating this behavior he identifies himself as a policeman and makes reasonable inquiries ... he is entitled for the protection of himself and others in the area to conduct a limited search of the outer clothing of such persons in an attempt to discover weapons which might be used to assault him."

I'm sure Warren didn't italicize the words "reasonably" and "reasonable" either. I did it to show that words like reason, reasonable and reasonably are the foundation of the Fourth Amendment. And random searches are almost by definition unreasonable.

Yet the practice still persists at our airports, and I think I know why. Conducting random searches is the politically correct way of trying to ferret out potential terrorists. Racial and ethnic profiling -- which some have proposed -- might be offensive and repugnant, but it has at least one thing going for it.

Racial and ethnic profiling, as a technique in determining who might be a terrorist seeking to bomb or hijack an aircraft, is much more reasonable than a random search. But the current zeitgeist in America is that we don't want to dare offend anyone from specified ethnic, religious or racial groups. (It's far better, I suppose, to offend Joe or Jane Average with a random search.)

So the more reasonable approach is tossed out in favor of the unreasonable, clearly unconstitutional one.

What's reasonable about a random search? Not one blessed thing.

Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.

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