Racial Profiling

I was going to write a response to Brad's comment on the 'Why Do They Hate Us?' post, but I decided that the topic was worth a post of its own. In that post, I wrote in passing that I hoped racial profiling wouldn't be necessary to stop terrorism. In his comment, Brad suggested that we should do racial profiling if it works. So, I wondered, does it?

To all outward appearances, it certainly seems as though it should. To take the reductio ad absurdum argument, let's say a flight has two passengers, and we're going to search one. One is Betty Lundgren, a 75-year-old grandmother of six from Indiana. The other is Abdul Mohammad Hussein, a 22-year-old student from Saudi Arabia. Hmmm, who should we search?

Part of the problem, of course, is that over 99.9% of all men with Abdul, Mohammad, or Hussein in their names are not terrorists, so to have a decent chance of catching those who are by racial/ethnic profiling, we'd have to search a very large percentage of them, which isn't practical. So, we can search Abdul, but we're very likely not to find anything. I do, absolutely, think it's stupid to search Betty. Doing that, I think, is pointlessly P.C., just to show that we're not profiling, we're searching everyone. Speaking as a man, I'm perfectly content if 95% of their random searches are performed on men.

After thinking about this question, it seems to me that there are two types of situations in which racial profiling might be used: to catch terrorists on international flights, and to catch criminals domestically. I find that domestically speaking, I'm absolutely opposed to it, even if it does catch more criminals than would be caught if it wasn't used. One reason is that profiling isn't going to catch violent criminals; if it catches anyone, it'll be drug users or dealers (since arrest-able evidence must be found on the suspect for profiling to work), and I don't view drug use as all that serious. The main reason I oppose it domestically is that the major 'suspect group' is young black men, followed by young Latino men. I belong to neither group, but I've talked to blacks who've been pulled over for DWB (Driving While Black), and I can imagine how it would affect them. Being searched just for belonging to a certain demographic group quickly creates resentment within the group searched, 95% of whom are perfectly innocent. I don't want any ethnic group feeling persecuted just for the sake of catching a few drug dealers.

Internationally, however, my feelings are less clear. I'll admit that I'm not as worried about making Arabs or Muslims feel less persecuted, as 1) terrorists tend to overwhelmingly be from their ethnic group, and 2) the crime, when it happens, can cause hundreds of deaths. Here, if profiling works, I'm all for it. The main question is, does it work? Not being an expert, I can't know. I believe that even the experts aren't in total agreement. My guess is that if you're going to search people, profiling works better than totally random searches, but statistically, the improvement in the success rate is going to be tiny. Millions of people travel by air each year, and on average, less than a dozen try to blow up a plane. To find one of those by a random search, even one assisted by profiling, would be a wild stroke of luck.

So, what to do? A few days ago, I was pointed by Andrew Sullivan's very good blog to an article about airport terror prevention that focused on how the Israelis do it. The Israelis, of course, have a large percentage of Arabs in their own population, and are the world's number one terrorism target. (Lest they seem too much like victims, let's remember that this is because they've been an occupying power against over a million Palestinians for the last four decades.) How do they handle it? The article explains it, and it's very interesting. You should read the article, but the very short answer is that they focus on looking into people's eyes rather than searching bags. Does it work? The record speaks for itself; Israel hasn't suffered from air terrorism for over three decades. Why don't we do this? I sure as hell don't know. I suppose the answer is that change is always difficult, that even for airport security, there's resistance to changing the way things are.

One of the important things I took away from that article was that we need to be flexible, to do what works rather than what we've always done. And most importantly, not to do stupid stuff just for the sake of appearing to be doing something. After the most recent terror attempt by this Nigerian guy Abdulmutallab, the airlines decreed that people wouldn't be allowed to walk around for the last hour of the flight. Oh, good idea! Now the terrorists will only be able to try to blow up the plane at 30,000 feet, rather than on approach! That'll help so much! I was stunned that this notion wasn't laughed out of whatever meeting it was brought up in. This kind of dumbass idea just shows that we're not serious about stopping terrorists. The Israelis are, so they do what works. Will we ever get serious about it? Hard to say. As I said, I don't know whether profiling works. If it does, let's use it, even if it's not P.C. If it doesn't, let's not use it just so we appear to be doing something. Ideology aside, let's do what works.