New Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Profiling

Generally speaking Profiling is a bad thing. It's a shortcut, a cheat. The Automatic judgement about one particular class or group of people, regardless of their own individual characterists is stereotyping - it's bigotry. Plain and simple.

Or is it that simple?

The GOP certainly seemed to be quite fond of the idea when it comes to law enforcement and terrorism, yet completely allergic to it when it applies to hiring, lending and apartment hunting.

There's even been a bill recently introduced - with bipartisan support - that would allow racial and ethnic profiling of Muslims.

On last nights Hannity and Colmes the argument was put foward without hestitation that we need to focus on who these terrorist are. "They aren't going to send a 70-year-old woman out as a Suicide Bomber?"

This point was made by Mike Seigel at Newsmax stated:

On Sunday, June 2, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg had the chutzpah to be concerned more about the so-called Constitutional rights of individuals than the safety and security of the American people. The mayor has the right intent but the wrong position.

Police agencies profile as a matter of course. It is commonly accepted that most serial killers are white males in their 30s, perhaps 40s. It would be absurd not to focus on this group when attempting to solve a series of murders by a single individual.

So, Mr. Mayor, what do we know about terrorist acts against America? These acts include the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, the attacks on the embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the prior attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, and the ultimate attack of 9-11.

What we know about these acts is that self-professed Islamic fundamentalists committed them. So does that mean we check three-year-old children, 25-year-old white and black women, blond-haired and blue-eyed Scandinavian men? Of course not!!!

Well, actually they just might do exactly that - particularly if they know were busy looking the other way. In fact, they just might have started already.

We think we know what Terrorist look like right?

Young "Military Age" Arab men. Many in the GOP would argue that we need to focus primarily on these people and leave the "innocent" alone.

We're all famiiar with the idea of profiling "Silence of the Lambs" and the TV Show "Profiler" which are based on the work of the FBI Behavioral Sciences Division, which developed the technique to help find serial killers. People who commit repeated, compulsive crimes for specific psychological reasons. Those techinques were developed to help identify a single specific suspect, and allow a guide of when someone might be a "person of interest" who needs to be looked at more closely. Rarely has the profile alone been enough to capture a suspect, and sometimes they've been completely wrong.

These of course are highly trained and educated investigators, comparing dozens and dozens of specific factors to identify that one person. Terrorism is different. We aren't looking for just one person, we're looking for thousands of them - and they aren't all the same and you'll almost never have the same type of comprehensive data that the FBI uses for identification.

Trying to do this in the context of Airport Security and Law Enforcement is more likely to create stereotyping - the use of one or two distinctive characteristic to infer others - not profiling. And the accuracy of such techniques are likely to circle to bowl just as quickly as we misapply them.

Just look at the circumstances surrounding the capture of Ahmad Russem and the thwarting of the Millenium Bomb Plot.

On December 14, 1999, Ressam drove his rental car onto the ferry from Victoria, Canada, to Port Angeles,Washington. Ressam planned to drive to Seattle and meet Meskini, with whom he would travel to Los Angeles and case LAX. They planned to detonate the bomb on or around January 1, 2000. At the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) preinspection station in Victoria, Ressam presented officials with his genuine but fraudulently obtained Canadian passport, from which he had torn the Afghanistan entry and exit stamps.The INS agent on duty ran the passport through a variety of databases but, since it was not in Ressam's name, he did not pick up the pending Canadian arrest warrants. After a cursory examination of Ressam's car, the INS agents allowed Ressam to board the ferry. Late in the afternoon of December 14, Ressam arrived in Port Angeles. He waited for all the other cars to depart the ferry, assuming (incorrectly) that the last car off would draw less scrutiny. Customs officers assigned to the port, noticing Ressam's nervousness, referred him to secondary inspection. When asked for additional identification, Ressam handed the Customs agent a Price Costco membership card in the same false name as his passport. As that agent began an initial pat-down, Ressam panicked and tried to run away.

Inspectors examining Ressam's rental car found the explosives concealed in the spare tire well, but at first they assumed the white powder and viscous liquid were drug-related--until an inspector pried apart and identified one of the four timing devices concealed within black boxes. Ressam was placed under arrest. Investigators guessed his target was in Seattle. They did not learn about the Los Angeles airport planning until they reexamined evidence seized in Montreal in 2000; they obtained further details when Ressam began cooperating in May 2001.

Ultimately, it was Ressem's specific behavior that tipped off the INS, not the fact that he was a young military-age Muslim.

Another example: How the Real 20th Hijacker who was stopped at Customs by an alert agent.

[Customs Agent] Melendez-Perez, who spoke at Monday's hearing, stopped a man identified by federal officials only as al Qahtani at Florida's Orlando International Airport in late August 2001. The agent said he became suspicious when al Qahtani provided only vague answers about what he was doing in the United States.

U.S. officials then put al Qahtani on a plane back to Saudi Arabia. He wound up in Afghanistan, where he was captured by U.S. forces. He now is being held with other captives at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"This is an example of how a well-trained and alert INS inspector performed admirably in refusing admission to the United States of an individual who should not have gained entry," said Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic commission member and former Watergate prosecutor.

Again, the agent was tipped off by this person behavior, his specific behavior. Melendez-Perez stated that he thought, based on the persons military bearing, look and most importantly his cold attitude that he was dealing with a contract killer. As it turned out, Muhammad Atta was downstairs waiting to pick Qhantani up and most likely mmake him part of the 9-11 team.

From the 9/11 Commision Report:

The inspector noted Kahtani's hostility from the moment he called his name through the hour and a half spent
interviewing him with the help of a Department of Justice translator. Kahtani was clean-cut with a military build. He had no return ticket and became threatening when asked
where he was going, how long he was going to stay, and who was meeting him. Although he had enough cash for a ticket home, he did not have any credit cards.
Kahtani's answers to questions kept changing. Without a return ticket and limited funds, the secondary inspector sought to exclude him as an intending immigrant. The inspector's real concern, however, was that Kahtani was up to no good. The inspector told the Commission in his written testimony:

My first question to the subject (through the interpreter) was why he was not in possession of a return airline ticket. The subject became visibly upset and in an arrogant and threatening manner, which included pointing his finger at my face, stated that he did not know where he was going when he departed the United States. What first came to mind at this point was that this subject was a "hit man." When I was in the Recruiting Command, we received extensive training in questioning techniques. A "hit man" doesn't know where he is going because if he is caught, that way he doesn't have any information to bargain with. 188

This inspector had noted on prior occasions that Saudis coming through Orlando had a reputation for spending a lot of money at Disney World. Denying a Saudi entry was
unusual, and inspectors told us they were generally concerned about the repercussions of taking such a step. However, after Kahtani refused to answer any questions under oath, the inspector decided to seek his supervisor's approval to recommend that Kahtani be barred as an "expedited removal," meaning that he could be deported without a hearing.

Furthermore:

Mohamed al Kahtani, a Saudi, the only operative other than Mihdhar who appears to have attempted a solo entry, arrived on August 4, 2001 at Orlando, Florida. He was also the only operative to be refused entry to the United States. 184

Records indicate that Atta was waiting for him at Orlando International while Kahtani was in secondary immigration inspection. Atta did not leave the Orlando airport until after it was clear that Kahtani was going back home.

Again the fact that Khatani was a Muslim, didn't even enter into the equation, but his is being a Saudi actually aided in his ability to enter the U.S. since the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are "allies". All of the 9-11 hijackers were either Saudi or from the United Arab Emerites. They were specifically chosen and recruited because they wouldn't be profiled as being terrorist since they weren't from Palestine or Iran. There is every reason to believe that for attacks against the U.S., future recruits will be "far from the beaten path".

Yesterday's Diary. on former captive Jill Carrol's comments about her kidnappers are very illustrative. Where a five year-old boy talked proudly of becoming a "Holy Warrior" and one man's pregnant wife looked forward to the day when she too could become a suicide bomber.

In 2004 two Russian Airliners were destroyed by Suicide Bombers - both of them were women. In fact, Suicide Bombers have become increasing Female.

As a spate of suicide bombings around the world in recent years has shown, the face of terror is increasingly female. In 1991 a female Sri Lankan separatist killed herself and former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Since then similar bombings have occurred in Turkey, Pakistan, Israel, Uzbekistan, and Iraq.

Racial Profiling has been looked at for quite some time, and the simple truth is that it doesn't work. As I wrote last year.

Racial profiling, where black's are more frequently targeted for arrest among our Police agencies, remains a serious problem of bias. Following up a previous study in New Jersey, the ACLU found in a study conducted in Rhode Island that:

● As was true in the first study, minority drivers were more than twice as likely as whites to be searched or frisked by police. Statewide, for those vehicles stopped, 7% of black drivers and 6.2% of Hispanic drivers were searched compared to 2.9% of white drivers.

● Despite the proportionally greater number of searches of minority drivers, white drivers - just as in 2001-2002 - were still more likely than racial minorities to be found with contraband when searched.So minorities are searched more, arrested more - but they do not have higher occurances of possesing drugs or other contraband.

If we carry this failed policy into terrorism, we're likely to actually decrease our ability to detect and capture terrorists - we're more likely to put ourselves at risk.

But that hasn't stopped the right-wing from arguing that we need to profile from the highest hills.

Before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on New York and Washington D.C., the illegal practice of racial profiling by the police and others was morally distasteful. This practice involved detaining persons of a particular race or ethnicity based solely on the biased belief that they were more likely to be wanted criminals or in the process of committing a criminal act. The illegal practice had little to do with legitimate police investigative techniques. America is the process of condemning the illegal form of racial profiling as an investigative tool and identifying those persons guilty of the practice.
Investigative Tool

Unfortunately, the terrorist attacks have caused us to revisit the acceptability for racial profiling based on a specific circumstance. To date, our government investigation has indicated that the terrorists who launched the attack against the United States were all of similar ethnic origin and belonging to a particular secular religious group.

The truly interesting thing about this is if you asked the self-same people about Affirmative Action, just what response would you get?

Update:How about what GOP Darling Ward Connerly would say?

Ward Connerly has an idea. It is simple yet revolutionary. And it needs to be debated seriously. It is this: The government has no business asking individuals to report their race or ethnicity on official forms. Connerly, you may remember, was a driving force behind Proposition 209, the ballot initiative that sought to ban race and gender preferences in government employment, programs, and contracting. The measure was approved handily by the voters in 1996.

But Connerly grew frustrated as he watched government officials ignore or seek to thwart the intent of that initiative.

As a follow-up, he has proposed a more radical measure. The only way to prevent the government from using racial preferences, he figures, is to prevent the state from recording the race of the people with whom it deals. This idea has the added lure of fulfilling an original dream of the civil rights movement, to create a color-blind society, or at least a color-blind government.

The interesting to note about Connerly's proposed "Racial Privacy Initialive" (which was ultimately defeated in 2004) is that it banned the governments ability to track a persons race, yet it had a large exception for the race of persons applying for housing. It seems that Connerly recognized that "there remains a large problem with discrimination" in this area and we needed to retain the tools to track and fight this discrimination. One of those tools, Connerly admited was identifying a persons race and then tracking if they were being unfairly denied access.

Oh, really? And how did we ever know we have discrimination problems in this industry?

Because we we're tracking it. And we need to continue tracking it. The fact that these hijackers were radical muslims is important, but that isn't the only issue.

Race and Ethnicity is something we should pay attention to, we shouldn't completley ignore it - but neither should we allow it to become a deciding factor in our decision making either about hiring or in law enforcement. It can be part of a larger picture of who an individual is, it can provide prospective, but it's not a magic bullet - it is not a be-all-end-all answer to the primary question we all face each and everyday.

Who are we?

Vyan