[QUOTE=Miller]
Which is yet another argument against why racial profiling makes any damn sense at all. If the concern is about Muslims, then we should be profiling every Asian man who wants to get on an airplane, because the vast majority of the Muslims in the world come from South East Asia. Arabs are a tiny minority of the global Muslim population.
[/QUOTE]
The trouble is that from a lot of these countries Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Muslims all look pretty alike. Are you going to require that the Muslims wear armbands with green crescents to help people identify the potential troublemakers?
You also have to realize that Israel doesn’t even have a Constitution: just a hodgepodge of laws that encourage discrimination against its Arab citizens. In any case, it is beneath the dignity of the United States of America, given our Constitution and history, to engage in racial or religious profiling.
[QUOTE=iamamoocher]
“The only Western country where racial profiling is legal is Israel and we see how safe it is there.”
But when is the last time an El Al airliner has been hijacked?
IIRC and I may not, after 9-11 US authorities asked the Israelis about their screening process and were told that young Arab men were picked out and questioned. When the Americans said: “We can’t do that–it’s racial profiling”. The Israelis responded: “Get back to us when you want to take this seriously”.
Many might find racial profiling odious, but does it work in the Israeli airliner case?
[/QUOTE]
Maybe I’m mis-remembering, but I could have sworn that one of the reasons that Israeli airliners don’t get hijacked is that Israel is perfectly willing to sacrifice hostages to eliminate hijackers. Not much hope of success there- although that may have been back in the 1970’s, when hijackers wanted something tangible (money, hostages freed) rather than Paradise…
But yeah, the security at El Al is stunning, or so I’ve heard- begins the moment you purchase a ticket, IIRC.
[QUOTE=monstro]
As a somewhat androgynous, brown-skinned person who often finds herself in off-road environments, I’ve been profiled as “suspicious”. I was once working out in the Hackensack Meadowlands for my graduate research when a guy drove up and started interogating me. He wasn’t law enforcement (didn’t identify himself as such), I wasn’t on anyone’s land, and I wasn’t doing anything particularly creepy. But the guy was so intense in his questioning that I was too scared to work after he drove off (especially since I made the mistake of telling him my name*). I went home and told all of my coworkers what happened, just in case I “disappeared”.
No, I didn’t feel safer knowing Joey Butt-in-Ski is driving around looking for “people who fit the profile”. I felt like I had been labeled as the enemy just because I don’t look Nordic, and it hurt.
*Before he drove off, he told me he was going to “check out my story”. I don’t know why, but that made me afraid.
[/QUOTE]
As an anything but androgynous male of the untanned variety I’ve been in the same situation you described. I am always poking around historical locations, usually with a camera in hand. I’ve had local people question my motives and call the police. I would feel safer if my neighbors acted a little more pro-active in this area.
Most people have the ability to pick up subtle behavioral queues. We use this innate skill to predict dangerous situations. Beyond that we recognize when something doesn’t make sense. If a person doesn’t understand what a stranger is doing then it is suspicious by it’s nature. It doesn’t matter if the actions are legitimate if they aren’t understood.
The situation described at the beginning of the thread made sense. Taking pictures of a nuclear power plant from a remote location (without any other purpose) is suspicious. Ignoring ethnicity for the sake of political correctness is counterproductive. Profiling takes into account a variety of commonalties involving any discernable marker. It can include behavior, dress, ethnicity, product choice, religion or an infinite number of other markers.
[QUOTE=Phlosphr]
The reward is knowing there is another human being on the other end of that telephone. The reward is knowing that they gave a sh*t to call back. That if they were meaning to do harm the right people knew about it.
The benefit is a slightly better sense of security for the first time in a while.
[/QUOTE]
What sort of reward or benefit is that? It seems to me that your response is begging the very question that it purports to answer. You assert that this particular report has “paid off” precisely because a completely innocuous and harmless group of people were investigated, and because some people (presumably you?) happen to feel a “slightly better sense of security” because of it.
Call me crazy, but i think we should measure the success of security measures by how much they actually improve and enhance security, rather than by how much more secure they make us feel. Sure, in some cases the two things might go hand in hand, but i’m not seeing it in this case. I’m sure having nail clippers confiscated at airport security lines makes some irrational people feel safer too, but it doesn’t actually make us any safer.
[QUOTE=Phlosphr]
Had they been terrorists and this incident made the evening news - as a foiled plot - people would be complementing the FBI’s response and happy someone called it in.
I fail to see your logic.
[/QUOTE]
It’s your logic that is flawed. This sort of “what if” scenario, the self-righteous claim that “If they really had been bad guys, you’d be thanking me now” is not a logical response at all. I’m not arguing that calling was necessarily the wrong thing to do (although i never would have called); i’m simply saying that there is no logical reason to assert that any good whatsoever came from this particular call. It did not “pay off” in any real sense whatsoever.
[QUOTE=Phlosphr]
Seems this thread was derailed from my choice of title. Sucks, because it’s become evident that there are people who think nothing should be reported to the authorities for fear of racial profiling.
[/QUOTE]
No. My response actually has very little to do with racial profiling. I just can’t get too worked up about people taking pictures from public land of a facility that, judging by your own link, can be pretty well scoped out using Google maps.
I don’t quite get the gist of the title of the OP either, to be honest. But let’s look at it from the perspective of the guys taking the pictures.
By way of example, I am a 6-foot Black male. I don’t think I’m physically imposing, but I’d guestimate that I’m taller than most people. I like working late at night, and occasionally I’ll go to campus in the evenings, let myself in to one of the academic buildings (which I have keys to and an office) and work. When I do this, I make a point of looking around to see if anyone’s around, and say hi, even if I don’t know them. If someone was to stop me and ask for my ID (assuming it was an authority figure, like a cop), no prob. Because I realize that I’m in a building with millions of dollars’ worth of books, computers, etc. after hours, and I know it’s unusual that I’m there after hours (not because I’m Black, but just because it’s usually empty after 10 pm). I expect, and am not particularly bothered by someone in another office calling, or someone calling the campus police when they see me enter the building after hours. Of course, I would hope that it happens to people who are not Black or male as well, but it’s hard to know that for certain. And if it happened during regular hours and I was targeted while others were allowed to go about their business, I’d think it was fucked up.
So - if those guys are thinkers, I imagine they expected to be noticed doing what they were doing, and it sounds like they took the appropriate steps to get permission, etc. They were likely prepared to answer questions, and probably anticipated being asked questions. Was the OP’s friend racially profiling those guys? I guess we’ll never know, will we? Because people tend to say that they would do the exact same thing if it was someone of a different race, but it’s pretty much impossible to test that hypothesis without having the exact same situation take place, with the same circumstances, at the same time. Hard to say.