This week, a county police department in Atlanta settled a lawsuit brought by two comedians who were stopped and searched in the city’s airport. As part of the settlement, police will no longer conduct such searches.
Unfortunately, airports still occupy a legal gray area where the Bill of Rights is more like a list of suggestions.
“I was just racially profiled by two plain clothes Atlanta PD police in @Delta terminal T3 at the Atlanta airport,” comedian Eric André tweeted in April 2021. “They stopped me on the way down the bridge to the plane for a ‘random’ search and asked [if] they could search me for drugs.” Atlanta-based comedian Clayton English later reached out to André and said he had been subjected to the same thing months earlier…