A couple years ago, on my first visit to Romania, I was taking a bus with my girlfriend to the center of Bucharest. The bus ticket system worked like this: you buy a ticket on a booth someplace, go wait at the bus stop, and when the bus arrives you climb in by which ever door you find open and punch in the ticket yourself. No interaction with the driver or anybody else, no entering through just the front door. But what really caught my attention was that some people got on, punched in and looked briefly around, almost nervously reassuring themselves they’d been seen behaving as good citizens.
I pointed it out to Vero, and she told me that during Nicolae Ceauşescu’s regime, where the system had been put in place, members of the police used to travel on the buses in plain clothes, blending in with the crowd and checking for things they disapproved, such as people in a communist system trying to get a free ride on a bus.
Sixteen years after Ceauşescu’s death, some people were still looking over their shoulders for the secret police.
Now in Indianapolis, bus passengers are being randomly checked on bus stops by agents in plain clothes, who are looking for “suspicious activity”. People are being patted down and their bags searched to discard them as security threats, in a move that is most likely a pilot plan to see how well their subjects will adapt to the idea of being frisked by random people, even on such quotidian tasks as getting on a bus.
I imagine they can only hope it’ll work as well for them as it did on other regimes.