For the last time! It’s J. EDGAR Hoover!!! Not HERBERT!
D’oh! & Duh! I feel silly. Based on your response I’m guessing I’m not the first to make this particular mistake. Based on your tone I’m guessing I had better be the last!
DaLovin’ Dj
Sorry, just one of my pet peeves.
Why don’t we react to terrorism by trampling the very freedoms and rights that we are fighting to protect?
Racial profiling is wrong. People are scared of dying. I understand that. But, I would rather die than have our government start cracking down on certain minority groups, basing their decisions not on evidence but on generalizations.
Perhaps there’s a tendency now to think we need to do this. But, harrassing groups that look a certain way won’t stop terrorists, people. It just gives these terrorists another victory in their assault on our way of life.
No need to be sorry, Fight Against Ignorance and all! Thank you for correcting me.
Clucky, you and others on the “Travesty” side make very good points. It does seem that alot of freedoms are being eroded. I have had to open up my turntable and record cases to go to gigs 5 or 6 different times now. They ask for ID, look in the boxes, and wave me on. My papers in order . . .
Now they have new phone tapping abilities. Now they have new detention powers. Now they can engage in racial profiling without it being against the rules. Soon they may be able to track any citizens movements and purchases. I must say the terrorists accomplished quite a bit of change in the place I live. Change I find to be repulsive.
On the flipside, they took out 5000 plus people and fucked up lower Manhattan and the Pentagon. They (presumably) are sending biological weapons through the mail. The risk is now greater then it has ever been. We must do SOMETHING . . . but what can we do that does not sacrifice freedom in return. I just hope the freedoms that get sacrificed can save lives.
I’m reminded of a comic I saw in a newspaper. It had a motherly looking woman with shopping bags passing through a military checkpoint. The soldier, with gun strapped to back, asks her “Where do you wish to travel, Citizen?” to which her response is “September 10th. :(”. Hit it right on the head for me.
DaLovin’ Dj
I’ve been thinking maybe we should start thinking about sacrificing lives to save freedoms. This is a war. I think the terrorists have come closer to taking away our freedoms than fascism and Communism ever did.
I was racially profiled once crossing the border from Canada to the US. I fit the race and state of someone who was being sought after. I was detained and my car was searched. I was treated politely but cautiously. I was naturely a little shaken but no harm came of it. If that was all that racial profiling was then it should be ok. I was treated decently. now if the person they were looking for was a mass murdered then maybe I would have been treated worse. but the point is that although profiled I was treated decently. its when a detained innocent(presumely) person is treated badly that gets all the attention.
Just out of curiousity, what would your feeling be if you had to go through that rigamole once a week? How about once a month?
Because racial profiling isn’t just about being harassed, it’s also about being harassed more often than folks in other social groups.
Thank you dj. 
I am definitely in agreement with you on the potential for abuse. However, almost every measure of safety comes with some amount of potential misuse. Police officers in many places prove that one price all countries pay for having a police force is abuse or misuse of the privilages police officers have. So with every measure of security comes a potential for misuse and/or abuse thereof. It’s a trade off which needs to be first weighed, and secondly closely monitored to ensure minimal abuse.
As far as “Big Brother” coming into play (or potentially becoming more active), I don’t think this should be a major concern. For the most part, the database I’m suggesting is doing little more than centralizing all the information which currently exists in multiple places. One thing the recent events in the US has shown is that better sharing of accurate information is needed, rather than more rules or regulations. If the information already exists, then the folks you were alluding to will more than likely be able to track the political dissidents they deem unholy with or without the database I’m suggesting. They just may need to make an additional phone call or two to get all the information. The database would, for the most part, allow people at the international entry points to have more access to information regarding people who shouldn’t be allowed entry (or at least detained slightly until it their identity is cleared).
Besides, Big Brother is already watching.
For example, the current satellite technology along with traffic monitoring cameras can potentially be used to follow a person pretty much across any major US city which has a large system of traffic cameras installed.
Or take for example, England. They have entire neighborhoods wired with cameras. With the upcoming nano technology, they’re going to have cameras which can transmit a picture in a unit no bigger than an average sized honey bee. Now THAT scares me.
But, IMHO, I think an international database could go a long way in helping to share information between many countries and thereby making international terrorism at least that much harder to coordinate.
My apologies to the debaters of this thread for the hijack.
I’d like to make a distinction between what happened to justinh and racial profiling. The police were looking for a suspect for a crime that had already been committed. They had a race and a state and, apparently, the idea that this person may be trying to flee.
Racial profiling is stopping people for no reason except that they fit a profile. Sometimes the profile is "black guy in nice car. Nowadays it’s “Middle-Eastern looking”.
A crime has been committed. Planes have been used as bombs. The suspects are (or were) Middle-Eastern. I’ll agree that in many cases stopping Middle-Eastern people may be good police work inasmuch as we have a vague discription of the suspects and we are stopping people who fit the discription.
However a lot of what is going on now is not good police work. It is harrassment. It is even worse than “driving while black”, it’s “looking somehow Arabic”. I can’t believe how many people are nodding thier heads and thinking “It’s for the good of the country.”
No, this is not good for our country. It is a smack in the face of quite a few of our founding beliefs. And it isn’t making us any safer. How many terrorists have we caught stopping cab drivers?
Rjung,
thats a good point. I guess that the thing that impressed me is that they were polite/efficient. Its almost as though they thought “we are just looking for a thief and the chances are that this is not the guy”. there was no abuse or anything.
used to have long hair and drove a motorcycle. and that meant getting stopped all the time and harassed. got kind of tiring but I got used to it. and they werent looking for any criminals . they only thought I looked like a “suspicious person”. but I was always polite and there was never any abuse.
Biggirl,
I think the police have to go with the only clues they have. What do you expect them to do, nothing?
If I went to South Africa and there was terrorist activity by the local white radical group, I would expect to be scrutinized. now if I was tortured then thats a different thing.
Thats the points,
- what do you expect the police to do to catch these guys?
- As long as they treat them as suspects and not criminals then is it wrong.
we dont live in a perfect world. we need police. there are bad guys among us. we have to be practical. I would think a video taping of all profile induced questioning would protect the innocent.
Thanks to Biggirl for making the important distinction between stopping people of a certain race just in case they were planning to commit a crime and stopping people when they match the description of a suspect in a crime that has already been committed.
Unfortunately, many people still believe that outlawing racial profiling means that police will not be able to use race as a descriptive factor in investigating and pursuing suspects. It doesn’t mean that. Racial profiling of the kind that’s being talked about today refers to a situation like we had in NJ where Blacks accounted for a huge majority of the people “randomly” stopped on the Turnpike and investigated. I believe it was found that no appreciably higher percentage of stops of Black drivers resulted in findings of wrongdoing than did stops of White drivers.
People who spoke out against this practice were sometimes accused of “police bashing”. And honestly, some of them were police bashers, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t have a legitimate complaint. The police were using a tactic that studies have shown doesn’t work! How is it police bashing to demand that it stop?
cuautemhoc,Biggirl,
let me clear something up.
when I was stopped, they were acting on a tip that a someone from texas was planning on smuggling something across the border. a crime had not been committed. they were just acting on a tip that something was going to happen.
maybe,they acted politely because they were looking for someone who had drugs hidden under the seat. now how would they have acted if they were looking for a suicide bomber? justified?
In my neck of the woods, the race being profiled is Asian, and the asian community is in an uproar. the police, including a large percent of black officers, defend they actions by arguing for police instincts and professionalism.
So did they stop you because you had a Texas license plate or because you looked Texan?
Pennylane,
they stopped me cause I was a white male about 30 years old crossing the border. and then my driver license showed I was from Texas so they detained me.
justinh, I see what you are saying, but they still were looking for a specific person. They had a description of a person that had some characteristics in common with you, and therefore they stopped you. I think the distinction we are trying to draw here is between the situation you describe and one where they stop all people of a certain race going over the border because they think that people of that race are more likely to be doing something wrong.
Suppose the border guys had never gotten any tip about a 30 year old white male Texan smuggling across the border. Suppose one of them decided to stop you because he “instinctively knows” that whites are x percent more likely to be smuggling something over the border than any other race. That would be kind of unfair to you, don’t you think?
Or, since that’s an implausible scenario, since white people are such a majority in the US and Canada, what if he stopped you because of your Texas tags? What if his justification was that Texans are x percent more likely to be smuggling something over the border than people from any other state? Not racial profiling (perhaps regional profiling?) but still not fair to you, an innocent Texan trying to make his way in the world.
On the other hand, maybe we feel that efficiency and effectiveness of law enforcement should take precedence over fairness in these times of uncertainty. Fine, but I ask again: Where has racial profiling of the type we’re describing been shown to be effective? Under what circumstances could racial profiling tactics make us safer, and not be a waste of law enforcement resources?
I can think of one scenario: If there were only five or six Arabs (Blacks, Latinos, Asians, etc.) in America, and we strongly suspected that the next terrorist attack would come from one of them, then we could efficiently use racial profiling tactics to monitor them, however unfair it might be to them as individuals, and prevent them from carrying out any terrorist acts. However, there are millions of them, and it’s not possible to do this.
If we’re going to do something that’s unfair to some people for the good of many more people, we ought to at least make it something that can be shown to actually work.
I am not saying that the profiling is good, perfect, or even effective. what I am saying is "what other choice do we have and if a suspect is stopped just because of his profile then he should be treated “correctly”.
Let me ask this: If the CIA would have gotten wind of a terrorist attack on sept 10th by arab terrorist, would the police have been justified to stop arab passengers and checking for knives, boxcutters,… the morning of sept 11th? If they would have taken away the boxcutters or frightened the terrorist off then we would be complaining about the police profiling certain groups because of rumors.
If on the morning of 9/11 custom officials had some kind of evidence that someone or someones fitting the description of a Middle-Eastern person was going to board a plane and commit a terrorist act, then yes. It would make sense to stop Middle-Eastern persons and check their baggage for boxcutters and such.
But— and pay attention here because this is a big but-- to randomly stop Middle-Eastern looking people because in the past there were Middle-Eastern terrorists is not only destestible, but unproductive.
I have an idea that 80% of all embezzelers are white males who wear suits. Is it a good idea to stand in front of office buildings and check the breifcases of all the the white males in buisness suits? Just in case?
Let’s use a real life example here… there is currently (according to the government) a very real threat that there will be a terrorist attack on a west coast bridge within the next week. Presumably there are law enforcement officers surrounding these bridges doing a variety of things, one of which might well be stopping and searching some number of vehicles. Would it be OK for one of the criteria used in deciding which vehicles to search to be the ethnicity of the driver?
No – because they are making assumptions about what the terrorists look like. As has been mentioned before, there isn’t a single “terrorist look” that can be used, so any attempts by any law-enforcement officials to stop “terrorist-looking” folks is (a) harrassment of innocents who happen to have that appearance, and (b) not bleepin’ effective.
If they must inspect vehicles carefully, I’d rather they inspect all of them with equal paranoid zeal. Slow as heck, sure, but it’s fair. And isn’t that what this country is about?