Didja hear about the two asshat politicians who think that racial profiling is a dandy idea?

"They all look a certain way," said [state assemblyman Dov] Hikind, a Democrat from Brooklyn. "It's all very nice to be politically correct here, but we're talking about terrorism."

They all look a certain way?

Aside from being monumentally racist, this statement tends to ignore all the people who have committed terrorist acts who aren't young Arab males.  (Female suicide bombers in the Middle East?  Richard Reid?  Timothy McVeigh?  Eric Rudolph?  Germaine Lindsay, one of the 7/7 bombers?  The Chechnyan terrorists -- women -- who brought down the two Russian planes last year?  Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers?  The Unabomber?  The Indonesians who bombed the nightclub in Bali?  The pregnant Irish woman who unwittingly carried a bomb onto an El Al flight?  The man dressed as a Catholic priest who hijacked a plane in Colombia?)  Methinks "I'm-Not-Really-A-Democrat" Dov Hikind is trying to curry favor with his base.  And Staten Island Republican Councilmember James Oddo has endorsed Hikind's race-baiting tactics.

See, "political correctness" has nothing to do with it.  I know it's hard to do, but let's set aside the repugnant comments of Hikind and Oddo, and look at things in the cold, clear, reality-based light of day:  Racial profiling doesn't work.  Aside from the examples listed above, which would argue that not all terrorists quite so neatly fit the racial box they're being placed in by Hikind and Oddo, we should examine the concept of profiling itself.  Profiling isn't necessary a bad thing...but it has to be done correctly.  It shouldn't be done on the factor of race alone.  It should be done by, say, intelligent cops acting on constellations of suspicious behavior.  After all, that was what caught Ahmed Rassam, who planned to blow up LAX in December 1999.

That last link was to a book excerpt and blog post by security expert Bruce Schneier.  This is worth quoting at some length:

When you see someone lurking in a dark alley and change your direction to avoid him, you’re profiling. When a storeowner sees someone furtively looking around as she fiddles inside her jacket, that storeowner is profiling. People profile based on someone’s dress, mannerisms, tone of voice ... and yes, also on their race and ethnicity. When you see someone running toward you on the street with a bloody ax, you don't know for sure that he’s a crazed ax murderer. Perhaps he’s a butcher who’s actually running after the person next to you to give her the change she forgot. But you’re going to make a guess one way or another. That guess is an example of profiling.

To profile is to generalize. It’s taking characteristics of a population and applying them to an individual. People naturally have an intuition about other people based on different characteristics. Sometimes that intuition is right and sometimes it’s wrong, but it’s still a person’s first reaction. How good this intuition is as a countermeasure depends on two things: how accurate the intuition is and how effective it is when it becomes institutionalized or when the profile characteristics become commonplace. . .

Profiling works better if the characteristics profiled are accurate. If erratic driving is a good indication that the driver is intoxicated, then that’s a good characteristic for a police officer to use to determine who he’s going to pull over. If furtively looking around a store or wearing a coat on a hot day is a good indication that the person is a shoplifter, then those are good characteristics for a store owner to pay attention to. But if wearing baggy trousers isn't a good indication that the person is a shoplifter, then the store owner is going to spend a lot of time paying undue attention to honest people with lousy fashion sense. . .

Ethics aside, institutionalized profiling fails because real attackers are so rare: Active failures will be much more common than passive failures. The great majority of people who fit the profile will be innocent. At the same time, some real attackers are going to deliberately try to sneak past the profile. During World War II, a Japanese American saboteur could try to evade imprisonment by pretending to be Chinese. Similarly, an Arab terrorist could dye his hair blond, practice an American accent, and so on. . .

The trick here is to make sure perceptions of risk match the actual risks. If those responsible for security profile based on superstition and wrong-headed intuition, or by blindly following a computerized profiling system, profiling won’t work at all. And even worse, it actually can reduce security by blinding people to the real threats. Institutionalized profiling can ossify a mind, and a person’s mind is the most important security countermeasure we have.

Customs agent Diana Dean, who caught Rassam, stopped him because he was acting "hinky"...his behavior was suspicious, and when probed, became even more suspicious, which justified a search.  He wasn't suspicious because he an Arab, though; he was suspicious because he was sweaty, jittery, fidgety, and wouldn't look questioning officers in the eye.  An intelligent person caught Ressam...but if we focus on young Arab males to the exclusion of everyone else, we're trading some of that intelligence away.  We're taking that ineffable combination of experience, intuition, and quick analysis that resides in good law enforcement officers, and we're tossing it out with the garbage, and substituting a rigid profile that can't possibly fit every terrorist trying to get through.  The false positive rate is too high (lots of young Arab men to check), and we won't have time or the resources to check out people who don't fit the profile, but are acting "hinky" nonetheless.

Schneier also makes a couple other quite-salient points.  First up, he points out that "whenever you design a security system with two ways through -- an easy way and a hard way -- you invite the attacker to take the easy way."  If you're exclusively looking for young Arab males, that'll pretty much guarantee that that's who the terrorists won't be.  They're going to game the system.  Remember how the 9/11 attackers took lots of flights around the country in the six months or so prior to the attacks?  They were gauging airport security, testing its limits, finding holes.  And "trusted-traveler" programs are no help either.  If we assume that, say, only economy-class one-way tickets bought for cash by people who aren't carrying luggage are held by terrorists, we risk not catching the terrorist who buys his first-class seat with a credit card weeks in advance, and checks a bag.  Like Mohammed Atta.

Another good point from Schneier:  "If we are going to increase security against terrorism, the young Arab males living in our country are precisely the people we want on our side. Discriminating against them in the name of security is not going to make them more likely to help."  Exactly.  Most young Arab men are not terrorists...99.99%+.  Why not get them on board?  After all, they don't want to die in a terror attack either.

But all this is apparently lost on James Oddo and Dov Hikind.  Hopefully they don't advocate the NYPD pulling motorists over for "Driving While Black."  One would also hope they wouldn't advocate other forms of discrimination which are equally abhorrent.  I'm especially puzzled about this in Hikind's case -- his official bio not only says that he is "a spokesman against discrimination of any kind" (wrong!) but also trumpets the fact that he is the child of Holocaust survivors, protested Reagan's visit to Bitburg, and traveled to Austria to protest Kurt Waldheim's presidency.  You'd think that someone who was anti-Nazi as Hikind would see the ironies in advocating singling out people for police search and harassment because of their ethnicity.

(Full post on the current asinine "random" bag search policy on the NYC subway TK.)

Comments

[Ayelet]

"They all look a certain way" is exactly what Hitler and his henchmen said about Dov Hikind's parents and ancestors (mine, as well). Of all people, Hikind should fucking know better.

[Ayelet]

And I just sent Hikind a note telling him exactly that.

[Vidiot]

Good! I think I'll call him. (Makes me wish I was a constituent of his.)

[David]

u r so right u pay too much attention to this u gonna miss that.