What is wrong with Racial Profiling?

[ag]

There is a very simple practical argument against profiling: people are not selected to be bombers (or, for that matter, drug smugglers) at birth. If profiling becomes obvious (that is, if a probability of being checked is a lot smaller for a blonde female with perfect English than for a dark male with a Pakistani accent), than it is a matter of a short time before the identity of the bombers will change (with devastating consequences). If you think of it, the London bombers were not the type that anyone would have profiled against ex ante - they were native-born and spoke fluent English, which came totally unexpected.

There are enough of light-skinned Muslims with light hair in this world, so that it might be possible to find someone willing who looks perfectly European (would you easily distinguish a Turk from an Italian - I wouldn't, except by accent, and I've spent a lot of time among both)? Would you figure a Hui (Muslim) Chinese from the standard Han variety? Or, if such a person is not available, a friendly Columbian (Irish, Tamil, Communist, White Supremacist - take your favorite pick) terrorist cell give them a hand in exchange for future service elsewhere (such cooperation is not unheard of). Or it could be a matter of time before an unwitting girl- (boy-)friend, or even an unrelated messenger is used as a sitting duck ("could you get this box to the post office, please?"). 

In other words, the most obvious problem with profiling is that it discloses your strategy to the enemy - something to be avoided at all costs.  Entirely random checks might be a seeming waste of resources, but they are going to be more effective in preventing bombings.  It would be a different matter, if a certain proportion of dark-skinned Muslim youths were programmed at birth to explode in the crowds, willing or unwilling. However, this does not seem to be the case, mercifully.

Additionally, profiling creates distrust/ rejection in exactly the sort of communities cooperation of which is needed (and over 90% of which would be very willing to provide all cooperation possible if treated nicely). But this is a secondary issue, I would think.

Of course, it is an entirely different issue if you know the race of a perpetrator who has already committed the crime: it would indeed be stupid to stop all motorists to find the person who held up a bank if 10 witnesses have testified that this was a black guy. The act has happened, there is no way the identity of the criminal will change.  But what we want here is to stop the crime, before it happens, not after.

[ag]

It still blocks off thousands of opportunities for them, though, so I would say go for it.

It closes some, but it opens other opportunities for them much much wider. On balance, it probably makes their job easier, not harder, since it makes them better able to predict what you will do (see my previous post).

[ag]

NYTimes now says that there is a serious suspicion that the London bombers might not have intended to die - they were dupes (for one, they bought round-trip train tickets that day). It may or may not be true, but this just follows up on why profiling is wrong: if there might be some difficulty recruiting suicide bombers from outside the group, getting some innocent chap carry a backpack that explodes in the Tube could be fairly easy (haven't anyone ever asked you to carry a heavy bag for a friend who is just busy/sick and can't do it himself? "Oh, its' just my old computer, I think my grandpa wants to get online" ).

In fact, this would be the obvious tactics if any obvious profiling is observable. And the most obvious way to make profiling unobservable is not to profile: it's true, you might be really searching for young Muslim males, but you have to be going through the motions with pretty blond Scottish girls and their grandmothers. It's the same as in the airport: of course, they don't expect a portly middle-aged pastor, or an M.P. to explode in midair - but not checking their luggage would make that luggage an obvious target.

[ag]

How many Muslims have blonde hair and blue eyes? Of course you can't tell 100% of the time.

First, is someone male or female? Males more likely to be terrorists.

Young or old? Young more likely.

Arab or not? Arabs more likely.

Muhammad their first name? Yes, more likely.

It's not that hard al.

Well, Russia alone has over 10 million Muslims, of which a very substantial chunk (a couple of million) would be very light-skinned, with blond to light-brown hair and blue to light-brown eyes. Most of the remainder would be indistinguishable from the Sicillians or the Chinese.

And, by the way, in recent years an overwhelming majority of suicide bombers there have been widowed females, frequently in their thirties.  None of them were called Muhammed.  Of course, the shift to females has happened since no male man from the Caucasus (an large majority of whom are Christian) can ever pass a single policeman without being checked, double-checked and extorted for the privilege (they aren't afraid of racial profiling there). An average man from the Caucasus, by the way, is only easily detectable in the crowd in a very light-skinned country like Russia (he is likely to be lighter-skinned than most South Europeans).  Additionally, the terrorists have had no problem to get blond Slavic converts to do the job when necessary (these tend to be the most fanatical). 

The statistics is simply a consequence of the current policy. You change the policy, the statistics would change - would you then argue for profiling blonds? What should matter is not what the statistics says, but which policy will make the terrorists' job more difficult. Letting the terrorists know that a light-skinned girl will not be checked makes their job easier, not harder.

Once again, I don't see any problem using racial information when searching for a perpertrator of a crime that already happened (if you have reasons to believe that a particular bomber WAS Pakistani - go forward, investigate the Pakistanis and leave the Swedes alone).  However, using it is a preventative strategy is worse than ineffective - it plays directly into the terrorists' hands. 

[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.

[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.

[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!

[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).

[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.

[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

[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.

[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.

[ag]

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.

But frequently not different skin color than millions of people in the area they attacked. In othe words, if you define the target group sufficiently generally to encompass all the attackers in recent years, you've almost defined the profiling away (at least, as a useful tool, since you won't be able to logistically check the entire target population, and would get swamped with thousands of "false positive" alerts, detracting the resources from useful terrorist-fighting efforts). And if you narrow it down to manageable levels (e.g., just Muslim Arab young males looking obviously middle-eastern and speaking with a heavy accent , you would have missed most terrorists - ALL, every single one, of the London batch, by the way).

Also, letting the women over 35 or men over 55 go just guarantees that the next attack will be by an older individual. So, why imposing these arbitrary constraints?

Once again, it is OK to "profile" as long as you continue to randomly search everyone. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), once you are doing it, you have defined profiling away - you are simply randomly searching the entire population. It is what I've been saying all this time: the most efficient way to conceal profiling is not to profile.

And it is not possible to non-randomly search the entire target population every time they enter a train, once it is defined generally enough to include even a majority of the perpetrators in recent attacks. You'd know what I am talking about if you've been to either NYC or London in recent years. If you just look at non-Americans (or non-Brits - well, over 20% of NY Metro Area population were born outside U.S. (more than that in the City proper). That's 4 million people right there!  In any case, the most of the people, who exploded in London last month were born in the U.K. - they spoke accentless British English (the only exception was Jamaican). If you define any "non-white" as a target group - well, that's a majority of NYC population. If you include "Arabs" (though most, if not all, London bombers were non-Arab, I think) - well, a lot of the Arabs are virtually indistinguishable from South Europeans (especially, those from Southern Italy and Southern Spain) and Jews - if you included those groups, you've included overwhelming majority of NYC residents.

If you insist on doing this, logistically it would be a lot easier, much more efficient and even less offensive to just prohibit the target population take public transit (or even intern it).  At least, that would have the benefit of not having to rely on faulty ethnic reconition by the police: just give the subway passes to White Native-born non-Arab Americans and don't give them to the rest.

[ag]

ag, you just aren't addressing what people like Jake and I are saying.  You keep up with this myth that a profiling policy means you only search those who fit the ethnic profile.  The facts is that profiling does not do this, it simply levels a higher scrutiny against those who ft the profile than those people currently recieve.  You would still see searches of older people and other ethnicities, and its fundamentally dishonest for you to continue to pretend otherwise.  It has been repeatedly explained to you and others in no unceratin terms what a profiling policy means, and you continue to willfully mischaracterize that policy.

Well, if you randomly search everyone, it is not profiling in my book. If you just look slightly more carefully at some types - they do it anyway, and have always done it, and will always do it, irrespective of the usefulness of the strategy. If all the discussion is about "whether some types of people should be checked more frequently" - it's not worth discussing.  Even if the police get explicit orders not to do it, they will still do it - it's human nature to single out "strange-looking foreigners". Not that I think it by itself prevented many a terrorist attack, but that's not something I would care about that much - in my book that's not profiling.

As anyone who belongs to a "suspicious" ethnic group will testify, they do face a lot more checks than a run of the mill white girl does. Hey, I am a bearded guy who travels internationally a few times a year with "strange" documents, and speaks with an untraceable but strange accent - I can testify myself (I can tell you even in which airports I am being profiled "in", and in which "out" - I've just learned never to go through Houston, since I always miss connections there).  As far as I am concerned, it is still a waste of resources, but it is a sort of a battle not worth fighting. As I said once before: if you see a Middle-Eastern looking guy going unchecked, whereas they are checking you in the airport, it is most likely because they've just checked him around the corner. If you see this on a train - well, if it's random, it's random (some Arabs won't be checked, and some whites will be, even if you check Arabs a lot more frequently, as they most definitely do).

[ag]

I still don't think you're understanding. We continue the random searches on everyone, but supplement the searches with extra attention to those who fit whatever profile you're looking for.

I understand.  What's so controversial? How is it different from the current practice in force since times immemorial? Do you honestly think that "young foreign-looking Arab males" don't get searched at a much higher rate than blond Swedish old ladies?  Do you honestly think that even an explicit ban on doing so would change this?  I still could argue it is a dumm waste of resources, but the world is so full of dumm waste of resources that one learns to live with it.  If all the argument is about "whether one could check 'Arabs' more ferquently than 'WASPS'", then there is nothing to argue about  - I could bet that the current practice is a lot more racially discriminatory in this respect than you'd like to impose.