Racial profiling gets all the news but other types of profiling do seem to be more effective.
men as a subset are more prevelant as
terrorists.
folks over dressed for the weather. Or
large bodies but head and neck not in
proportion.
nervousness, sweating, evasive
answers to innocuous questions?
Of course if the majority of terrorist bombings have been committed by young men of middle eastern descent who are practicing Muslims…you would have to be foolish for not using this information in the profile you are making to scout for potential targets.
The racial and physical characteristics should should only be a component not the only reason. Additionally being an Irishmen or Italian in a business suit doesn’t get you a free pass, it just gets you checked at a lower percentage. To really make it effective random stops must be made on top of that.
My two cents. I am a very frequent flyer, often last minute. I get the full search almost every time I fly. It never bothered me. I often wish they had sharper people manning the checkpoints. Maybe more supervision.
Good points all around, and yes, profiling is necessary. I would like to see it going more the direction Hedo, BostonBarrister and BookerT mentioned, though.
The last few years I flew very frequently (2-5 cities/mo) and my tickets were always purchased last minute. That automatically puts me in the “profile” of a potential terrorist and I got the fabulous strip search at each and every airport (the “SSSS” on the bottom of your ticket marks you for this pleasure and I dubbed it the “Super Special Strip Search” identifier). I did learn that joking with the TSA personnel about deserving a tip after the groping I’d just received didn’t go over very well… May have been that English was never a first language for any of the workers.
One way to avoid all the hassle though, is to fly private. Luckily, a number of my trips were on private aircraft and the feeling of driving onto the tarmack, handing your bags to the captain and being met onboard with a cocktail with only minutes to wait before being airborn is indeed wonderful… The extra sleep you get since you don’t have to factor a minimum 2 hour wait at the airport is great, too!
I’m curious what security measures would be put in place if terrorists started utilizing private aircraft.
I’d just add that profiling is not a new phenomenon, but one that must be used cautiously and respectfully.
But we profile every time we walk down the street: can anyone here truly say that if they were walking on a street alone at night thet’d have the same instinctive gut feeling about seeing a large, tattoo-ed guy with a shaved head coming towards them as they would a thirty-five year old woman in a business suit?
Instincts may not be politically correct, but they work often.
A pair of excellent articles from two people who would probably be searched more often if racial profiling were employed:
That Feeling
Of Being
Under Suspicion
What of “profiling” as an anti-terrorism forensic tool?
BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN
Friday, July 29, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
After the terrorist bombings in London, and the revelations that many of the perpetrators were of Pakistani origin, I find that I am–for the first time in my life–part of a “group” that is under broad but emphatic visual suspicion. In other words, I fit a visual “profile,” and the fit is most disconcerting.
The fact that I am neither Muslim nor Pakistani is irrelevant: Who except the most absurdly expert physiognomist or anthropologist could tell from my face that I am not an Ali, or a Mohammed, or a Hassan; that my ancestors are all from deepest South India; and that my line has worshipped not Allah but Lord Shiva–mightiest deity of the Hindu pantheon–for 2,000 years? I will be mistaken for Muslim at some point–just as earlier this week in Manhattan five young men were pulled off a sightseeing bus and handcuffed by police on suspicion that they might have been Islamist terrorists. Their names, published in the papers, revealed that they were in fact all Sikhs and Hindus–something few could have established by simply looking at them. (The Sikhs here were short-haired and unturbanned.)
What we had in this incident–what we must get used to–is a not irrational sequence: alarm, provoked by a belief that someone in the vicinity could do everyone around him great harm, followed instinctively by actions in which the niceties of social intercourse, the judgmental taboos that have been drilled into us, are set aside in the interest of self-preservation.
Terrorism has had many effects on society, and the foremost among them are philosophical, or spiritual. We are now called upon to adjust the way we live and think, and to do so we must also adjust the bandwidth of our tolerance. By this I don’t mean that we must be less tolerant of others but that some among us must learn to tolerate–or put up with–hardships, inconvenience or a new set of presumptions, given the all-consuming nature of the threat we face, in which “the profiled” and “the profilers” alike are targets.
In evaluating the moral fitness of “profiling,” I should stress that we are identifying people for scrutiny, not punishment. Recall the fate of Cinna the poet, in the Bard’s “Julius Caesar,” who is killed by a mob that believes him, because of his name, to be Cinna the conspirator. When scrutiny becomes stigma, and stigma leads to victimization, a clear jump to evil has occurred. This has not happened in America, and must not.
But what of “profiling” as a forensic tool? Here, one must be satisfied either that profiling ought to be done or at least–per Bentham–that it isn’t something that “ought not to be done.” I am satisfied on the second count. The practice cannot be rejected with the old moral clarity. The profiling process is not precisely racial but broadly physical according to “Muslim type.” (Does that make it worse or better?) The process under way now does not constitute racial profiling in the classic sense–Muslims, after all, come in flavors other than Pakistani, including white Chechens and black Somalis.
But there is no getting around profiling, surely, because of the life-or-death, instant decisions involved. So we have to ask one section of society to bear up under heightened scrutiny, asking them also to work extra hard–visibly so–to expunge the threat. Meanwhile, and just as important, we must ask the rest of society not to stigmatize those who conform to the broad physical category while also not allowing feelings of racial and moral guilt to slow our society’s response to danger.
If I’m sounding overly nuanced on a subject that should, in the view of some, have bright moral outlines, it’s because the devil resides in this predicament. We are all facing the quandary of the policeman chasing a suspect who might be armed. Does he shoot or hesitate, shout a warning and possibly get shot? In that situation, society asks that he take the risk of self-harm. In our current situation, large swaths of society might be eradicated. Suddenly we all feel like the cop, and some of us like the suspect.
I am just as concerned about catching terrorists (who may look like me) as anyone else who looks different. I can ask that the searches and scrutiny be done in a professional manner, with no insults and nothing that offends my dignity. I, too, see the absurdity of subjecting Chinese grandmothers to the same level of scrutiny as people from the Indian subcontinent at the airport check-in counter.
Do I like being profiled? Of course not. But my displeasure is yet another manifestation of the extraordinary power of terrorism. I am not being profiled because of racism but rather because Islamist fanatics have declared war on my society. They are the dark power that leads me to an experience in which my individuality is corroded. This is tragic; but it strengthens my resolve to support the war that seeks to destroy terrorism.
Mr. Varadarajan is features editor of The Wall Street Journal.
Tunku Varadarajan writes the piece I wish I’d been capable of writing myself ( Opinion & Reviews - Wall Street Journal ) [Note - this is the piece above - I cut the quotes from teh above piece]
Fortunately, Varadarajan is, in my view, peerless, and so I can hardly take umbrage. Earlier on, he wrote a column for OpinionJournal.com, “Citizen of the World,” ( http://www.opinionjournal.com/ ) that was one of the most eclectic, bizarre, and delightful columns I’ve ever read. Standing utterly alone, Varadarajan called for the restoration of monarchies across central and eastern Europe, among other things.1
Varadarajan captures my own sentiments in his conclusion:
Do I like being profiled? Of course not. But my displeasure is yet another manifestation of the extraordinary power of terrorism. I am not being profiled because of racism but rather because Islamist fanatics have declared war on my society. They are the dark power that leads me to an experience in which my individuality is corroded. This is tragic; but it strengthens my resolve to support the war that seeks to destroy terrorism.
This phrase–“an experience in which my individuality is corroded”–holds particular resonance for me.
Until two weeks ago, on Amtrak (which I despise with a virulent passion http://www.theamericanscene.com/2005/04/note-on-amtrak-amtrak-parked-all-its.php ), I hadn’t encountered any overt rudeness on ethnic grounds (is “racism” the right word?) in years. For me, it’s long been an article of faith that American are far less racist than Europeans, and vastly less racist than the South Asians I’ve encountered. Being of South Asian origin, this strikes me as significant. It’s worth recalling that two weeks ago was soon after the 7 July bombings in London. Amtrak officials had hastily put in place literally worthless “security procedures,” and you can understand a certain level of skittishness. And yet I encountered virtually none until I entered the snack car to purchase a danish and a pint of low-fat milk. (I kid you not.) It’s easy to be snide about the incident–Aha! The snack man is on the frontlines, and must malign all danish-eating Bengali kids who dare to cross his path–but that’s screwed up. Who knows what was going on in his brain. People are rattled, and it’s fair enough. This, of course, is not what Varadarajan is talking about, but, inevitably, it led me to think about “my individuality.”
I’m not one for hurt feelings. After that strange encounter, I joked with friends that I finally have license to be a preening, self-righteous bastard. The logical response, of course, is, “So wait, all these years you’ve been an unlicensed preening, self-righteous bastard?”
Re: the terrorists: may they burn in hell.
While we’re on the subject, my first post-college job started in earnest the second week of September in 2001. (That’s right.) Growing up in Brooklyn, I’d often go to the World Trade Center for the 4th of July because, when I was young, both of my parents worked there, though not at the same time. My new job–as a reporter-researcher at The New Republic–was in Washington. That Tuesday morning, I was sent out to fetch a book. As I walked back to the Metro, I was struck by eerie silence, and the sense from the silent TV monitors I encountered on my way that something awful had happened. At that point, I was crashing with a cousin (an extremely generous and kind cousin, who was a far more observant Muslim than yours truly) in northern Virginia. I was a pro-Bush neoconservative who had flirted with Students for Forbes and my cousin was a fairly apolitical Canadian with grave reservations about the American role in the world. It was weird. Unsurprisingly, we both saw eye to eye on what had happened. No other response would’ve been decent, and this was a decent young man.
More relevantly, I very vividly recall riding the Metro the next morning from the end of the Orange Line, in Vienna, Virginia, back to work. That first stop was largely empty, and I wondered what people would make of me or how they’d treat me. Rest assured, that wasn’t my first priority. Like all of my friends, I wanted an immediate, crushing blow against the perpetrators (in fact, I feel silly to even have to point this out). But as a lonely kid who was very much out of my element during a really terrifying time, I did have a sense of unease. That one long journey on the Metro did a lot to reassure me.
Let me be clear. “Reassuring Reihan” shouldn’t be a priority. I do care about using our collecting resources wisely, and preserving an open society. In the end, I welcome increased scrutiny. It means that law enforcement is doing its job. That said, I worry about what will happen when attacks are perpetrated by “unusual suspects,” and I hope we’re prepared.
I’ve gone on long enough.
1 It’s long been my belief that the forced incorporation of the various princely states of British India, under the suzerainty and protection of the Crown, ought to have been given three rather than two options, the third being independence. Not because I’m a monarchist, mind you, but because (a) it’s entirely possible that greater geopolitical diversity in the region would have redounded to its benefit over time and (b) it would’ve been cool. And (c) it might have forestalled considerable bloodshed. That’s important too.