I began to wonder about passenger profiling. Why is it whenever this subject is brought up it’s instantly assumed that they mean “Racial Profiling”? Police use profiling tactics constantly and many times race is not even a factor. They do profiles of white males all the time.
Is it just that in this country we feel that there is no reason to bother with the more difficult road that requires planning and reasoned thought, when we can just have a knee-jerk reaction that makes us feel safer like taking tweezers from bags?
I’ll give you a very personal reason why passenger profiling is unwise. I’m a long-haired humanoid, and I have been “randomly selected” for a closer inspection on about one-third of all the international flights I’ve taken going out of or returning to the United States.
I’m also a reasonably smart guy, and I know what I look like, and I make extra certain that I’m clean as a whistle before I step into an airport.
But if I suddenly decided it was a good idea to hijack a plane or blow it up, you know what I’d do? I’d shave, cut my hair, and put on a business suit. It would dramatically increase my odds of success, because the security folks are busy searching the guys who look like losers.
I would ask this question. For every person with criminal intent who is apprehended by profiling, how many go unmolested by simply changing their profile?
Sofa King, your reasoning is flawed. It’s like the smoker who tell you his unle smoked to be 95. So what? It does not disprove the fact that smoking causes cancer.
Suppose we knew with all certainty that all terrorists were males aged 26. The fact that you are a male aged 26 and not a terrorist does not mean we should start screening 80 year old nuns.
The fact is that while terrorists can come in any profile, they tend to come in some profiles much more frequently and to start screening 80 year old nuns in detriment of 25 year old males is not the best way to identify bad guys. Of course an 80 year old nun could be packing a bomb under her tunic, so what? We are dealing with statistics, we are not dealing with you.
In the original post, I posted a link to the type of profiling described. Profiling people with long hair is just the type of profiling that the trained security people at Ben Gurion would avoid, that’s a leftover vestige of the 60s “square” mentality in the US and has little if anything to do with reality. They ask you questions such as “Why did you come to Israel, where are you from?” Those questions can lead them to other questions and finally to answers. One of the things the Israeli consultants stressed is that racial profiling is not necessary and is for the most part counter-productive as the average arab is not going to be a terrorist. It cites an example of a pregnant Irish woman being misled by her Jordanian boyfriend into carrying a bomb onto the plane. Now she would not have fit the profile of an Arab male, however through the techniques used by El Al the bomb was found. Profiling is not as shallow as so many people seem to think.