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NYPD Developing Portable Body Scanner For Detecting Guns
Zothecula writes "You have to feel sorry for the police officers who are required to frisk people for guns or knives — after all, if someone who doesn't want to be arrested is carrying a lethal weapon, the last thing most of us would want to do is get close enough to that person to touch them. That's why the New York Police Department teamed up with the United States Department of Defense three years ago, and began developing a portable scanner that can remotely detect the presence of a gun on a person's body. The NYPD announced the project this week."
What they are talking about is a terry stop. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_stop) They can stop and frisk you for weapons based on reasonable suspicion of involvement in criminal activity.
Just because it happened to me once, they can have a "reasonable suspicion" that you are going to j-walk because you are walking down the side walk!
You will find that they can find "reasonable suspicion" in just about anything. S/His eyes were blood shot (Drunk or stoned), S/He looks out of place in this neighborhood, and my all time favorite "Three white guys under 25 at the mall must be there to cause trouble"
Note that "Reasonable Suspicion" is defined as a point where the investigating officer has weighed the totality of the circumstances to determine whether sufficient objective facts exist to create reasonable suspicion. VERY open and abused quite regularly in my opinion.