In horrifying detail, women accuse US customs officers of invasive body searches(washingtonpost.com)
washingtonpost.com
In horrifying detail, women accuse US customs officers of invasive body searches
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-horrifying-detail-women-accuse-us-customs-officers-of-invasive-body-searches/2018/08/18/ad7b7d82-9b38-11e8-8d5e-c6c594024954_story.html
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In two cases, the plaintiffs say they were billed.
Talk about adding insult to injury. This is awful.
Talk about adding insult to injury. This is awful.
Not to mention incredibly stupid. That bill will cost them licenses and likely their employers hundreds of thousands of dollars as evidence of their complicity in court when their best defense is itself a reason for harsh condemnation "just following orders". They don't have the obscenity of qualified immunity to hide behind.
Why aren't these searches recorded using a CCTV system?
TFA tries to get statistics from CBP/Homeland Security and the Justice Department on how often these searches result in drugs being discovered but none are provided.
The article does explain that 11 cases should not be taken as evidence that few of these searches are performed against innocent people because filing the suit is so difficult and traumatic in its own right.
But we get no hard numbers throughout the article. “Scores of complaints going back years” is the closest they come. And even though furbyhat’s comment is dead, I will say that it is frustrating to be left wondering — why are we just reading about cases against women? Was it because that’s all the cases there were or is it done as a rhetorical device to garner greater sympathy?
A quick Google search and the first three pages are all about female victims. Eventually I found another story featuring a female victim but where the 2nd to last paragraph was;
”The woman making the claim is the third reported case of police conducted body searches since last week. New Mexico residents David Eckert and Timothy Young have recently come out with similar stories of having experienced an anal cavity search after being stopped for a traffic violation. No drugs were found in either Eckert or Young.” [1]
Why are the innocent male victims merely a footnote in the exposee and entirely ignored in TFA? I hate the feeling that WP ignored male victims because they just didn’t fit the narrative.
[1] - http://www.drugpolicy.org/blog/body-cavity-searches-are-dist...