What is wrong with Racial Profiling?

[AuH2O]

The only guy of the 4 that would be impossible to profile is the first one (Jamaican). 3 out of 4 ain't bad. Yes, I know Indonesia has the most Muslim people.

I'm also not talking about what Russia should do. Or the US. Or Spain. Or China. For those that can't read.

The bottom line is that fair-skinned people in Britain are unlikely to be bombers, particularly with the IRA not doing much these days. I guess the majority of Muslims in Britain are originally from India or Pakistan, so excuse my "Arab" claim and simply change it to "being descended of people from the Indian subcontinent."

This is actually extremely simple math. Any time you are trying to detect a certain characteristic (i.e. being a suicide bomber), you want to winnow down the potential pool as much as possible. In doing so, there will be some error. However, by properly structuring the guidelines you can keep most of the targets in the pool while removing much of the junk (non-terrorists) around them.

Actually, the Arab point only makes this more useful, because if the main candidates are Pakistani, Somali, etc., then someone "white" is highly unlikely to be a threat. In Britain, that is the overwhelming majority of the population. Using other factors (age, sex, etc.) you can, without a shred of doubt, improve overall security by at least 1000%, probably more.

If you really want, this can be simulated with basic math most posters could understand. I won't vouch for al but even he might be able to.

[ag]

Something else came to my mind. I once did a study of sociallist terrorists in the early twentieth century Russia. Many of those (including the leaders) were ethnically Jewish. Jews are generally quite distinguishable in a blond Russian crowd (easier distinguishable than a Muslim would be in New York or even a light-skinned Indian in London if he were to dress in jeans and sweatshirt), and at the time were legally banned from settling (or even visiting without a reason) most of what is now Russia, including the big cities, so the police had a perfect reason for "profiling" (they weren't afraid of being accused of doing it - it could only earn them a promotion).

The strategy of those terrorists was to follow their selected target (usually, a governor or a minister) for months, figuring its routine, and then blowing it up. To do this, they would become horsecab drivers or street vendors (Russian cities were overpoliced even back then, so nobody else would be able to stand on a street for any length of time without provoking keen police inerest).

Now, there weren't any Jewish horsecabdrivers back than in Moscow or in St. Petersburg - this would just have been illegal on its own, and cause their arrest and expulsion to their hometown, or worse.  Remarkably,  "racial profiling" was almost never a problem for them: minimal acting gift, the horse and the clothing of a cabman, a fake ID, knowledge of provincial Russian geography and care to pretend to be from the village nobody's been to since the deluge, a bit of color in the hair - and before you knew it, the guy was in front of the princely carriage, throwing a bomb.  In the unexpected clothing nobody ever even suspected their Jewishness.

Enough for profiling effectiveness.  Hopefully, the security services are a lot smarter than that - signs are, they are.

[AuH2O]

Jews are a lot closer to Russians than Pakistanis are to Brits. No hair-do is going to make a Pakistani look Scottish.

I'm not sure your example teaches us anything except it's better to be draconian. As you note, Jews were instrumental in early 20th century radical socialism that resulted in the Bolshevik enslavement of Russia and, later, Eastern Europe.

[ag]

then someone "white" is highly unlikely to be a threat.

That's only true if you don't do profiling. The day the profiling becomes obvious, the overwhelming majority of future bombers will be white (and for the first few attacks, they will be extremely successful).  Why would anyone want to give outh the securty strategy to the terrorists - beats me. Of coure, profiling might be not obvious - but for that to be the case numerous blond white women would still have to be stopped and inconvenienced, even if the police are just doing this as a diversion.

[AuH2O]

Right, you would still check other people, it's just you wouldn't let 15 Pakistanis pass while you search an old white lady.

And, like I said, where are these white bombers going to come from? These attacks are NOT that easy to pull off-- you can't just dupe people into carrying massive bombs around, especially, with the terror alerts.

Plus, making all their current active cell members less valuable is a huge blow to terrorist organizations. Even if they can somehow recruit people that would evade profiling, it hurts their operations far, far worse than it inconveniences the police.

[ag]

Jews are a lot closer to Russians than Pakistanis are to Brits. No hair-do is going to make a Pakistani look Scottish.

I'm not sure your example teaches us anything except it's better to be draconian. As you note, Jews were instrumental in early 20th century radical socialism that resulted in the Bolshevik enslavement of Russia and, later, Eastern Europe.

But a Jew was a lot more physically and socially distinct from an average resident of St. Petersburg in 1905 than a light-skinned Pakistani is from an average Londoner today (definitely, than an average Arab).  Normally, police had no problem to find them in the street and imprison for the pass law violations.

As for your second point - it was precisely the long-term draconian attitude of the Czarist government to Jews that drove a (small) proportion of Jews to sociallist organizations. The only way to be more draconian was to go the Hitler way.

In any case, the terrorist socialist-revolutionaries were sworn enemies of the Bolsheviks (and of other Marxists - these were the anti-Marxist sociallists).  Bolsheviks on principle were against "individual" terror as tactics (and this was the reason they were not as seriously persecuted by the regime - it viewed them as a minor threat, and restricted itself to fairly short arrest and exhile terms, whereas the sociallist-revolutionaries were very frequently executed or imprisoned at hard labor for extremely long terms).  Once the Bolsheviks came to power, they took care of exterminating the socialist revolutionaries very early on.

Tells you, perhaps, how much your hindsight changes the threat evaluation - who'd think that the "Zurich cafe talkers" like Lenin, and not the bloody terrorists like Gershuni would be the real threat to the humanit!

[dazzleman]

Sensible profiling is absolutely essential to keeping terrorist attacks to the lowest level, in my opinion.  This is also the case with normal crime.

Should thousands of people have to die to appease the sensibilities of muslims?  Profiling is effective, but can never be 100%.  It's funny how some people bring out the one or two cases in which terrorists didn't look we expect terrorists to look, while ignoring the countless other cases in which they have looked exactly as we would expect them to look.

[AuH2O]

Well it's true the early radicals were eliminated, but the Bolsheviks had a rather large Jewish element (I mean, Lenin, Zinoviev, Trotsky, etc.).

I dunno... if I was a cop, I would have "profiled" 7 of the 8 London bombers. In Russia the problem was specific targetted killings, not mass casualties... 2005 London is much denser in population, and the threat is to controlled systems (transit).

[ag]

Right, you would still check other people, it's just you wouldn't let 15 Pakistanis pass while you search an old white lady.

And, like I said, where are these white bombers going to come from? These attacks are NOT that easy to pull off-- you can't just dupe people into carrying massive bombs around, especially, with the terror alerts.

First, are you sure that the Pakistani guy is not checked? In every airport they check you several times, just not always at the same place. Because I am bearded, I tend to be checked a lot ("beard profiling"), but once I was traveling with a Spanish colleague, and they checked him four times against three for myself (by the way, if you can distinguish a Spaniard from an Arab - who tries not to look "Arabic" - by sight, you must have seen a lot more Arabs and Spaniards than I ever did, and I've been dealing with both types for years).   Surely, at the checkpoint where they waived me through somebody would think that the strange bearded guy was being let off, while a decent clean-shaven chap was being checked! On the other hand, most observers, probably, were sure that my Spanish friend was an Arab - he does look the role.

As for your second point, we are dealing with an international organization here, not with local miscreants. It seems that every time the bombers have come from the place nobody suspected before. Nobody suspected the British-born Muslims - now they do. Nobody suspected Jamaicans - now they do. Nobody suspected Eritreans (the country doesn't have much in terms of Muslim extrimism; hey, they are almost majority Christian!) - now they do. A blond Russian or German convert (in Russia the former is common). A Chechen.  A Tartar. An Asian-looking Uighur or Hui Chinese.  A Philipino from Mindanao or a Mayan Indian convert from Chiapas. Would you identify the late NixonNow-the-father as an Arab in a line up? For god's sake, how do you profile a Scottish girlfriend of a Pakistani guy? The girlfriend doesn't have to know anything - she is given a backpack with a "computer that's broken" and told that a friendly computer whiz will be meeting her at Shoreditch to have a look at it.  Of course, she is never going to see Shoreditch - she is going to be blown up at King's Cross. The only way to avoid this is to continue inconveniencing everyone, including blond Scottish girls.

[ag]

Well it's true the early radicals were eliminated, but the Bolsheviks had a rather large Jewish element (I mean, Lenin, Zinoviev, Trotsky, etc.).

I dunno... if I was a cop, I would have "profiled" 7 of the 8 London bombers. In Russia the problem was specific targetted killings, not mass casualties... 2005 London is much denser in population, and the threat is to controlled systems (transit).

Well, if Lenin was Jewish, than so was a big chunk of the world's population. One of his grandfathers (or great-grandfathers? I don't recall) might have converted from Judaism early in his life (though there is some doubt about even that). Equally, he could be considered Tibetan Buddhist - his great-grandmother was a Kalmyk slave at birth, and that's better documented. Both his parents were Russian Orthodox Christians, more than half his ancestors were ethnically Russian Slavs.  His father was a civil service general (the Chief School Inspector for a large province of the Empire), which earned him nobility.  Lenin was born a Russian nobleman, a general's son. Even after his brother was convicted and executed for attempted assasination of the Tzar (hence, Bolshevik aversion to terrorist attacks), Lenin still enjoyed all the privilliges of his estate. Not even the antisemites in Russia thought of him as Jewish back then (it's highly questionable, if even Hitler would have considered him Jewish if he lived in Nazi Germany).

Trotsky's father (and the entire family) converted from Judaism to Lutheranism when Trotsky was 8 or 9, at which moment he was transferred to a German school of St. Nicholas, from which he graduated. At least, he had been born Jewish, but by Russian law he grew up German.  His father was a wealthy landowner. There is no known connection between Trotsky and any Jewish community since his conversion.   

Zinoviev and Kamenev were indeed Jewish, as was the first Soviet "President" Sverdlov (he died almost immediately). However, they did not view themselves as such. In fact, the earliest split within Russian Marxists came about because "antisemitic" Lenin-Trotsky-Martov and the gang would not recognize the "autonomy of the Jewish proletariat", with the result that the Jewish Marxists split into the Jewish Social Democratic Workers' Party "Bund". The "bundists" where mostly instrumental in creation of Israel, not of the USSR.

As for your second point, I am afraid, if you were a cop, you would have "profiled" such a large chunk of London's population that the city would have come to standstill long before any attack.

As for the "specific targeted killings", it was true (the uncle of the Tsar who was the governor of Moscow survived an extra week, because on the first night he was supposed to die he took his wife's boy nephews with him into the carriage, so the bomber didn't attack to avoid "child murder"). But wouldn't you think that the Tsar would have cared more about his own fate and that of his favorite uncle, than of the mass populace? And that the police minister would take more stringent measures to avoid his own assassination (they killed two in a row)? Trust me, those guys were thorough, radical and draconian in their own self-defence - I've read the police archives (they are at Hoover).

[AuH2O]

I meant ethnically Jewish, not religiously observant. Lenin is somewhat debatable, yes, but Trotsky's birth name was Bronstein I believe. There is a lot of philosophical debate about the role of Judaism in Marxism (dating to Marx himself, who of course was Jewish), but that is not the topic of this thread.

You are grossly misrepresenting the nature of the terrorist threat. Yes, there are radicals in a variety of places. But the intellectual core of radical Islam are the schools in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and the operational core is based on fighters trained in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Now, the top fighters don't carry out suicide attacks. But even at the operational level, the odds of a blonde woman carrying out a suicide attack is so low as to be irrelevant. Even assuming there was a population of non-Arab, non-Indian/Pakistani people willing to commit suicide bombings, the failed bombings in London and various other blown attacks prove training is critical to success.

You can make up various scenarios where profiling fails. But you cannot come up with many where profiling degrades security. Further, there are many scenarios where it succeeds.

Thus, proving it is technically possible profiling is only marginally effective is not an argument against it. In fact, if that's your best argument, it's a case FOR profiling. Like I said: It causes more problems for terrorists than it does police.

[ag]

Well, if Lenin is "debatable", than there are a lot of European countries that "debatably" come close to being majority Jewish using the same criteria. Having one convert great-grandfather was too weak a connection even for Hitler. As far as I know, Lenin himself might have been unaware of any Jewish ancestry. The rumors spread, mainly, because he had a speach defect that was at the time commonly associated with the Jewish accent (he couldn't pronounce the rolling Russina "r-r-r" sound, which is absent in Yiddish - or English, for that matter).

As for the nature of the threat, I am not misrepresenting it. There haven't been two streams of attacks coming from the same group of perpertrators. In NY these were Saudis and Lebanese, in Madrid - Moroccans and Algerians (whom most Americans or Brits wouldn't have distinguished from the Spanish), in London - a hodgepodge of ethnicities, with all presumed perpetrators British-born or, at least, bred. What makes you think that any of this will be repeated?  There are enough of dissatisfied people all over the world, and why would you be sure that a Kosovar Albanian, or a Bosnian Slav, or a Turk, or a Tatar or an Uighur or a Chechen or a European convert wouldn't volunteer (all of these have had representatives active in Afganistan and Iraq). Since you can't distinguis a Hui Chinese from a Han, you'd have to check all the East Asians. Since an Arab and a Spaniard look similar, you'd have to check the South Europeans. Before long, youre "profiling" is just swamped by the number of people you have to profile - it is simply an inefficient use of resources.  And, as I said, the actual mule bomber might not even be a perpetrator, so it could be the Scottish girlfriend.

In every scenario I have enumerated the chance of a successful terrorist attack grows, not falls, since you are giving your strategy out to the terror organizers.  Once again, I don't care weather deep inside Scotland Yard they are primarily concentrating on the Pakistanis, as long as this is unobservable to outsiders.  Unfortunately, the only way to make this unobservable is to continue dilligently pissing off everyone, without regard to ethnicity, gender, or age with random checks of everyone. 

And you can't just check every "non-white" looking guy on the train, in any case. To implement that efficiently either in UK or in the US, you would have to either require passengers to arrive to the station, say, an hour or two before the departure (like in the airport), or have the trains (or, at least, entrances) segregated. For any terrorist that this will catch or prevent, it will create 2 new volunteers and one random guy that just goes postal because he can't get to work. And using the resources needed to do this you, probably, could have prevented 10 attacks being at least slightly smart.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's funny how some people bring out the one or two cases in which terrorists didn't look we expect terrorists to look, while ignoring the countless other cases in which they have looked exactly as we would expect them to look.

I brought it up because the bomber who "didn't look how we expect them to look" killed as many people as the other three put together

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Should thousands of people have to die to appease the sensibilities of muslims?

No, but you can't tell a Muslim just by looking at them. That's the point. It's ineffective.

Even ignoring "white" converts (since converts are most likely to be fundamentalist it wouldn't be too difficult to find a few of these, see Walker Lindh and Richard Reid like I mentioned.) there are plenty who can pass for "non-Muslim" ethnicities. Southern Slavic ones most obviously, most Turks could easily pass for Southern Europeans, and some Iranians could easily pass for WASPs dressed in western clothing. Black Muslims would be indistinguishable from "normal" blacks if they dressed like them and most Indonesians would not be recognizabley different from most other East Asians to your typical American.

Interestingly most world security services have reported Al-qaeda is trying to recruit non-Arab members...for exactly this reason.

[ag]

To show what's wrong with profiling, a random picture from the webpage of Tatarstan presidency. This is a Cabinet session. As far as I know, most people present (or at least half of them) are Tartar - that is, they belong to a overwhelmingly Muslim ethnic group. The other half are, mostly, Russians

Try profiling!

http://www.tatar.ru/images/29_04_2005_3_m.jpg
http://www.tatar.ru/images/28_04_2005_2_m.jpg

[ag]

Even better: in one of the pictures that follow the President of Tatarstan is shown with a top local Muslim clergyman. In another, he is with a non-Muslim. Which is which?

http://www.tatar.ru/images/12_05_2005_1_m.jpg
http://www.tatar.ru/images/19_05_2005_1_m.jpg

[??????????]

What about behavior profiling?

[ag]

What about behavior profiling?

That's what they do all the time - what would be illegal about that (subject to usual unreasonable search constraints)? Of course, one has to be very careful - that's how they killed the Brazilian electrician in London.

[??????????]

What about behavior profiling?

That's what they do all the time - what would be illegal about that (subject to usual unreasonable search constraints)? Of course, one has to be very careful - that's how they killed the Brazilian electrician in London.

Well I firmly believe that Brazilian guy brought that on himself. Most people know better then to run from the police. Especially if you are acting in a very suspicious way.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

This seems to be why he ran away

[AuH2O]

The biggest thing that annoys me about this thread is that racial profiling opponents basically are doing this:

- racial profiling is wrong

And then explaining why by saying

- racial profiling is ineffective or would become ineffective

Well those are completely different arguments. Most opponents in the government stick solely with the first objection, which probably means they acknowledge the potential value of profiling but are unwilling to engage in it for political reasons.

[Smash255]

The biggest thing that annoys me about this thread is that racial profiling opponents basically are doing this:

- racial profiling is wrong

And then explaining why by saying

- racial profiling is ineffective or would become ineffective

Well those are completely different arguments. Most opponents in the government stick solely with the first objection, which probably means they acknowledge the potential value of profiling but are unwilling to engage in it for political reasons.

Well I tend to agree with both.  I do think racial profiling wrong on a moral basis, but even if you use racial profiling it doesn't help.  FDor starters someone who fits the description of those likely not to be checked could be paid high sums of $$$ to take packages &what not, or they could just send one of their members who doesn't fit the typical profile to do the job.  Not to mention their are terrorism cases that have nothing to do with arabs or middle eastern looking men (OKC for example)

[ag]

The biggest thing that annoys me about this thread is that racial profiling opponents basically are doing this:

- racial profiling is wrong

And then explaining why by saying

- racial profiling is ineffective or would become ineffective

Well those are completely different arguments. Most opponents in the government stick solely with the first objection, which probably means they acknowledge the potential value of profiling but are unwilling to engage in it for political reasons.

Note, that I have been always explicit about the following: it is NOT wrong to use racial information to investigate the crime that has already occurred: if you know that a black (white, blue, green, whatever) held up a bank/ exploded a bomb/ smuggled drugs, you would be nuts to stop white ladies randomly in search for the guy.  Neither would racial profiling be wrong if black males (as distinct from white females) had a tendency to randomly explode in the streets irrespective of their or anyone else's own desire to do so.  Neither would I object to profiling if it somehow could be done so that nobody would be able to observe it.  Unfortunately, it is not obvious how you would do that without randomly stopping and pissing off people of all races/genders/ages.

My point is precisely that racial profiling as a preventative measure against terrorism is, as they say, worse than a crime - it's an error. That's why, of course, it is discouraged as a matter of policy: it would have had negative effectiveness.  

What I object to is not the profiling per se, but the flawed logic used to justify it: "statistically non-whites are likelier to be terrorists" - the statistical oucome is a direct consequence of the no-profiling policy and would likely be reversed if the policy were to be changed. Racial profiling makes the terrorists' job easier, not harder: if they know that white females are not searched, the white females will become the ideal vehicles for attacks (whether willing perpetrators or innocent mules is irrelevant).

Finally (though this is very much a secondary argument), profiling is an extremely blunt weapon: by making suspects of an extremely large subgoup of the population (we are talking millions of people here), the policy spreads naturally limited resources extremely thin, making it easier for the real miscreants to disappear among the large numbers of their close and distant kin. Even if "statistical correspondence" were not an artifact of the policy, a random "non-white male" has a nearly negligible probability of being a terrorist, so unless a very large proportion of the target population is routinely checked (which is nearly a logistical impossibility unless you are talking about a very limited and controlled environment, like an airport), chances are that it won't catch anyone. Checking a very large proportion of the population will also present another inevitable statistical problem: a number of "false positives" (randomly scared guy who runs, an angry idiot who lashes out at the guards, a worker from a chemical factory with traces of potentially dangerous chemicals on his hands) that will swamp the workings of the system, diverting the police resources from real terrorist fighting.

Careful detective work is needed, not random targeting of huge subsets of the population.

[The Duke]

Here is why the arguments of the anti-profilers on this thread don't hold water.

The central objection of the anti-profiling crowd is that profiling won't catch everyone and that this means anyone who is not of Arab appearance will slip by a police force that employs profiling.

The central flaw in this theory is that if a police force employs racial profiling that does not preclude them from also using other, complementary police tactics.  If you racially profile you can still search persons for a number of other reasons.  The fact that a police force would not catch a Somali Muslim or Tartar Muslim through racial profiling alone doesn't mean that the police will see a Tartar engage in specific behavior and let him go simply because he is not Arab.

Profiling is one component in a larger police strategy that could enhance civil defenses against terrorist attacks.

[Jake]

Seems like those opposed are getting stuck in the rut of saying that not everyone would be caught or maybe they'll use white bombers. The fact is, a majority of terrorists that have attacked lately, especially in the US and UK, the places that profiling should be put in place, have been of a different skin color/racial group than the large majority of the country. Sure, you won't catch McVeigh if you only stop non-whites, but would you have caught the 19 fuckers on 9/11 or the 8 bastards that bombed the underground? Yes, obviously you would. Don't limit the profiling to just one group or ethnicity, search everyone who doesn't look American and use random searches on all males between 16-55 and all females between 16-35.