Profiling -
Why is it Commonplace and Accepted Everywhere but in
Security?
Which is more Un-American :
Groping innocent women and children, or 'profiling' passengers
|
|
Perhaps not all terrorists determined to attack the US
are young Muslim males, although the vast preponderance surely
are.
But self imposed
political correctness means we have to pretend that Southern
Baptist grandparents are as dangerous as single Muslim males
from Yemen.
Part 2 of a series on airport
security - links to other articles at the bottom.
|
Perhaps the worst part of the
latest nasty 'enhancements' to 'airport security' is the
knowledge that our resources are being misdirected towards
terrorizing absolutely normal Americans, for fear of being seen
to be 'profiling'.
But profiling means we can focus effectively on the people who
most likely wish to do us harm.
Profiling is a normal and
accepted part of most of our lives, because it works. And
it can benefit us both ways - simultaneously identifying the
most 'at risk' travelers for enhanced screening, and also
identifying the safest travelers who could avoid most screening
altogether.
Why
should our safety - and convenience - be sacrificed on a
baseless politically correct altar of anti-profiling prejudice?
Everyone Profiles, All the
Time, Everywhere Else
Profiling is an accepted and
essential part of the interactions we have in most of our daily
lives - it is so common as to be second nature, and we seldom
even think about it, whether we are the profiler or the profilee.
Here are five examples of profiling
throughout of our everyday
lives - you can probably think of another five, or even 55,
similar examples to add to these :
Pre-Approved Credit Cards
Have you ever received a
'pre-approved' credit card offer in the mail? Guess what -
you were profiled and selected to be sent that offer.
The profiling may have even
been as sophisticated as to advise you of a pre-approved credit
limit, and will have also been involved in some 'behind the
scenes' machinations such as determining what interest rate and
annual fee you'll be offered.
There's no law that says
credit card companies have to randomly send offers to everyone.
There's no law that says they have to balance offers sent to
people with 'A+' credit ratings and high incomes/net worth, with
a similar number of identical offers to recent bankrupts, unemployeds, and other people with bad credit, no income and no
net worth.
No-one has ever suggested
that, and to do so would be ridiculous.
Shop Assistant Help
Have you ever had a salesman
approach you in a store and offer to help you with your shopping
needs? Guess what - you've again been profiled.
The salesman looked around
and judged you to be the most likely person to buy something
from him, and so selectively approached you rather than any of
the other people around.
This decision to approach
you or not was made depending on who you are, how you dress and
present yourself, the type of store you are in, what you were
looking at, and - yes - the personal
preferences of the salesman.
But no-one is saying that
shop assistants need to make quotas for equally approaching
non-target audience members as well as prime potential
customers. This too would be ridiculous.
Fundraisers
If you've ever received a
fundraising letter or email, guess what - you've again been
profiled.
Not only have you been
selected as someone likely to support whatever the cause is, but
the profiling may have also automatically generated the
suggested levels of contribution. Wealthy and generous
givers receive higher suggested levels of contribution than less
wealthy and less generous givers.
But does anyone suggest that
Democrats have to equally contact Republicans as well as
people identified as favoring Democrat politics when asking for
money? Again, of course not.
At the Doctor's Office
You visit the doctor to
report an ache or pain somewhere and to ask for a cure.
The doctor or nurse may ask
you a bunch of questions about your lifestyle, your past
activities, and even about the health of other family members,
prior to settling on a possible diagnosis or at least an initial
line of testing.
Guess what they have just
done? They've just profiled you, determining what aspects
of your life and your inherited characteristics/attributes may
be impacting on your health at present, and using this
information to form a selective view of what the problem might
be.
Are doctors told that they
must treat all patients the same? Everyone with a headache
should be given the same treatment? Of course not.
Dating
If you're dating online,
what do you do? You fill in search parameters, and then
look at the resulting profiles, which you read through and then
select who to contact.
If you're in a bar or
nightclub, you're still profiling, but in a different sense -
you're looking at people's behavior, clothing, appearance, and
such like.
But, whether the process is
scientific and deliberative (online) or more irrational and
impulsive (in the bar with beer goggles on!) the fact remains
that you are profiling and selecting who you will approach.
Should we be required to
randomly approach people who we have no interest in, as well as
people we like? Should we date in equal numbers people
twice our age and people half our age?
Again, of course not.
Why Should Public Safety be
Different?
So, if all these other parts
of our lives allow for unregulated and uncontrolled profiling -
ranging from annoyances such as fundraising requests through to
beneficial things such as help in stores and possibly credit
card offers and on to possibly life saving things like health
care choices, why is it that airline security (and public safety
in general) should be massively handicapped by not being allowed
to use profiling?
What is the unique
circumstance that forces law enforcement agencies to adopt a
dysfunctional type of political correctness in their activities
on behalf of us and our safety? Why do none of the other
types of profiling also attract similar ridiculous constraints -
why are they universally accepted without complaint?
Some people will say that
the police used to abuse profiling by choosing to selectively
stop, eg, black youths who they see driving expensive cars,
believing them either to have stolen the car or to be engaged in
some illegal activity allowing them to afford the car, while at
the same time, allowing middle aged white couples, driving the
same type of car, to pass by without stopping them.
These people (who are almost
never middle aged white Cadillac owning couples) insist the police pretend
that middle aged white couples are as likely to have stolen a
Cadillac or to have paid for it from the proceeds of drug-running or pimping as
are teenage members of a black street gang.
Not Profiling Handicaps Police
Effectiveness
To the eternal discredit of
our police forces, they have accepted such nonsense and many now
require their police to be careful to stop people in careful
proportion to their presence in the population as a whole,
rather than in relation to the likelihood of their being
offenders.
The criminals are laughing
at the police, and at us, as they drive safely past a police
cruiser that has just stopped you and me, and so is unable or
unwilling to now pay attention to the bad guys.
Or, to put it another way,
next time you are asked to approve a tax increase for more
police, why not instead insist that your local community allow
the current police to work more efficiently, and to focus on
crime prevention and detection where it happens, rather than
aimlessly squander resources in areas of relatively less crime
risk.
Okay, so at least that element of
politically correct feel-good nonsense isn't risking our lives
too much.
It mainly means a few more criminals get to stay free, and a few
more ordinary citizens get tickets for exceeding a too-low speed
limit by an insignificant margin.
But what about at airports?
We're not just talking street hoods here, we're talking about
terrorists trying to blow up planes, trying to kill passengers,
and most importantly, trying to create incidents that will have
ripple effects all the way through our economy.
Surely our right to be safe
eclipses the alleged right of minority groups to be treated
identically to other demographic sectors (except, of course, for
when they are seeking special status).
The biggest loss/cost of a
plane being blown up isn't the cost of the plane, and neither is
it the deaths of the people in the plane. It is the harm
done to the nation's economy as a whole by the sudden
contraction in travel caused by the event.
A failure to detect and
prevent an airplane related act of terrorism stands to cost us
not just lost lives, but billions of dollars of economic
activity, thousands of jobs lost, and so on. Airplane
security is important, and we can't afford to 'pull any
punches'. We need to be 100% hard-on at doing the best we
can to keep our air services safe.
Using Your Sixth Sense
Police are taught to listen
to their instincts and their 'sixth sense'. If something
feels wrong, it probably is wrong, and sometimes police will
simply sense something 'wrong' or suspicious about a person or
the circumstance they are in.
But now, police have to then
modify their instinct and sixth sense, and stop and ask
themselves 'If I stop this person, might I be accused of
racially stereotyping and profiling?'.
Being as how a
disproportionate number of the criminals in this country are
members of minorities, the answer to that unnecessary question
is invariably yes, with the result being more criminals are
overlooked by police because they are members of 'high risk'
groups of criminals - quite the opposite outcome to that which
we surely wish.
Seeing No Evil
Do we have to close our eyes
to things that are self evident and obvious and to pretend they
do not exist? Do we have to make bad decisions in the name
of some perverse definition of fairness - and since when does it
become fair to you and me that our security (as well as our
comfort and convenience) is being sacrificed so as to make
Muslim visitors feel better?
The unavoidable truth of the
matter is that nearly 100% of all actual and attempted acts of
terrorism in the US over the last some years have been
perpetrated by young Muslim males - non-Americans in the case of
air terrorism, and sadly some US citizen/Muslim converts in the
case of other acts of terrorism. Should we as
non-Muslims (and perhaps as non-young and perhaps as non-male)
now be ranked as equally dangerous?
Of course, one has to feel
sympathy at a person being prejudged as being more/less likely
to have a certain attribute based on the observed tendency of a
group of people to which that person belongs having an overall
significant increase in that attribute being present.
And of course, 90% (probably
more) of all
Muslims around the world are not terrorists and may be as opposed to terrorism as is
everyone else.
But until we can know
whether each Muslim is in the 10% or the 90%, what should we do?
The incontrovertible fact is the chances of a random Muslim being a terrorist are a
thousand or a million times greater than the chances of a random
Christian or Buddhist or atheist being a terrorist.
Doesn't that mean - if all
other things are equal (this is a huge 'if' clause that will be
discussed in the next part of this series) - we should focus the
huge bulk of our scrutiny on Muslims?
And, being more selective
still (or, if you prefer, profiling some more), shouldn't we
screen single young Muslim males more closely than aged Muslim
women?
And, being even more
selective (or profiling even more) if the single Muslim male is
from Yemen, doesn't that mean he should immediately win the
'jackpot' of highest level scrutiny?
As for the 'injustice' this
would foist on innocent young Muslim males traveling to and
within the US, if that really offends them, they should do
something to control the incubators of terrorism in their
country, rather than demand we bare ourselves in front of them
and pretend the reality of the threat from their country does
not exist.
Wasting Our Security Resource
Refusing to profile, and
pretending that you and I are as much a risk as young male
Muslims wastes scarce security resources, causing them to be
spent scrutinizing we who don't need scrutiny, while
constraining them from concentrating on those people who most
need scrutiny.
So let's think about what
that means. Let's say you are in charge of airport
security and told that you must ensure that flights are safe.
But you are also told you only have sufficient resource to
either thoroughly screen one quarter of all passengers going
through the airport, or unsatisfactorily screen all passengers. You are given essentially three
choices :
-
Give all people an equal
level of screening, which while intrusive and resource
intensive, is unfortunately going to be
inadequate and which won't detect a skilled determined
terrorist intent on smuggling a bomb through security
-
Give perhaps 10% of all
passengers a thorough complete screen, and let the other 90%
go through security with nothing other than a quick walk
through a metal detector and carry-on items through an X-ray
machine - and choose the 10% of passengers
at random
-
Give perhaps 10% of all
passengers a thorough complete screen, and let the other 90%
go through security with nothing other than a quick walk
through a metal detector and carry-on items through an X-ray
machine - but choose the 10% of passengers as
being primarily young males of probable Muslim
persuasion and not born in the US
Which process will give you
the best security? Which process will inconvenience and
upset the least number of ordinary honest citizens?
Everyone with half a brain
will choose the third option. Alas, the TSA has chosen a
compromise of the first two options, while spurning the third
option completely.
Now, let's look at the
positive flipside to profiling which is seldom considered.
Profiling's Positive Flipside
Most people, when they think
of profiling, overlook the other sort of profiling. Profiling
can be used not only to identify higher risk people, but also to
identify lower risk people.
Think back to the airport
security scenario above. You need to decide which 10% of
all people going through the airport get an intensive screen.
Okay, so perhaps you say 'Muslim males get intense screening' -
but that maybe only represents 2% or 5% or something of all
passengers. Who else do you give intense screening to?
Now - think laterally.
Don't think who else you screen, but think instead about who you
can exempt from screening. Maybe you can exempt middle
aged second or subsequent generation American women with young
children at home and not traveling with them - they are far
removed from the profile of a typical suicide bomber (do you
know any middle class middle aged mother who would kill herself
for some vague ideology and orphan her dependent young children
in the process?).
Maybe you can exempt businessmen who have been elite frequent
fliers for five or more years in a row - they might hate the
airlines, but they are probably not
terrorists, either.
To put it another way, if
you decide you will exempt a lucky 10% of passengers from
screening, who do you choose? Do you randomly take one out
of every ten passengers waiting in the line and send them
straight through? Or do you use profiling and prior
screening processes to find the people least likely to be
terrorists and wave them on through?
Maybe this is an acceptable
compromise - although surely we should not have to compromise on
our security at all. But if there is a need to so
compromise, rather than pretending everyone is equal, and rather
than accepting one half of the reality - some people are greater
threats than others; we could instead action the other side of
this coin - some people are lesser threats than others.
Nexus
Maybe you can even create a
special type of fast lane for citizens who have been prescreened
and pre-rated as being low risk.
Impossible? Not at all
- look at the Canadian and Mexican borders, both of which have
fast lane 'Nexus' programs allowing citizens who have been given a
prescreening and a security interview to avoid the regular lanes
and regular screening and to drive pretty much straight across the
border with no questions asked (I have a Nexus card myself that
gives me wonderfully easy access in to Canada and then the same
wonderfully easy return back into the US).
Maybe you end up with
various categories of positive profiles that allow you to exempt
30% of all passengers from the need for screening.
Okay, so perhaps a very
clever terrorist manages to get into this 30% category, and
succeeds in smuggling a bomb onto a plane and blowing it and
himself up. But what is the alternative? If you have
no profiling, you end up with no-one getting thorough screening,
and any/all terrorists able to smuggle bombs 'internally' onto a
plane.
Profiling - Makes it Easier for
Ordinary People and Harder for Terrorists
With a mix of
positive and negative profiling, you've shifted the odds much
more in favor of safety, and at the same time you've massively
reduced the inconvenience to ordinary law abiding travelers.
Ordinary 'safe' passengers
find air travel more convenient once more, and the TSA can be
free to concentrate its scrutiny and its X-rays only on the
people more likely deserving of their focus.
Profiling is an inseparable
part of every other part of our normal lives. We should
welcome its presence to this most important part of protecting
the security of ourselves, our aviation system, and our nation's
economic health and safety.
This is part of a
series on alternatives to present airport security.
Please also see :
1.
Israeli style airport security
2. Profiling passengers
3. The Limitations of the
TSA
4. Protecting
Airports
5. General counter-terrorism measures
6. Sundry other ideas (coming soon)
Related Articles, etc
|
If so, please donate to keep the website free and fund the addition of more articles like this. Any help is most appreciated - simply click below to securely send a contribution through a credit card and Paypal.
|
Originally published
17 December 2010, last update
30 May 2021
You may freely reproduce or distribute this article for noncommercial purposes as long as you give credit to me as original writer.
|
Search 
