Few terms raise my neck hairs like "racial profiling", and for good historical reason. Racial profiling, the practice of applying extra-surveillance to a certain racial or ethnic group because that group is more prone to dangerous behavior, has a nefarious history in the U.S. It has undergirded many of our nation’s worst moments: Japanese Internment camps, Jim Crow, discriminatory lending, bigoted law enforcement. Though broadly discredited by responsible voices across the political spectrum, the question of racial profiling has recently re-arisen in the context of air travel and Muslims. Case in point: Liberal pundit Juan Williams famously confessed discomfort when flying on the same plane with people in traditional Islamic clothing.
These comments come as airport security grows increasingly inconvenient (some would say invasive), and the T.S.A. implements full body screening. Critics of the new screenings argue that everyone now suffers the inconvenient new screenings because political correctness has made it impossible to admit that Muslims pose a greater risk to air travel than other groups.
Here’s the approximate argument in favor of profiling Muslims at airports: This group of people can be linked to nearly every instance of air travel terrorism or attempted terrorism in the last two decades. It is wasteful and inconvenient to subject all travelers to increased security procedures when those efforts could be reasonably confined to one group of people and have the same net impact on air travel safety.
But anyone who thinks hard about a how a Muslim profiling program might be implemented will immediately understand how problematic it is: One fifth of the world’s Muslims are Sub-Saharan African, including the so-called Underwear Bomber, and another fifth are East Asian, including the Filipino Muslims of Abu Sayyaf, a terrorist group. Nigerian or Filipino Muslims look like Africans and Polynesians, not Arabs. And if Airport security staff started screening all people who look “Muslim” , imagine the uproar when US-born Greeks, Italians, Jews, and Latinos gets selected for increased security because a T.S.A. Officer interprets one as “Muslim-looking.” Applying increased security to people with Muslim names or dress is even sillier. The British/Caribbean shoe-bomber is named Richard Reid and his dress was completely western. Name changes are easy; slipping on jeans and a t-shirt easier still. Screening based on name or dress may throw a bone to nervous travelers, but it won’t catch a terrorist.
Immediately after 9/11, airport security staff engaged in profiling. I was walking proof. With two days of scruff and dark features, I was consistently “randomly” selected for the extra pat-down at the airport and manual bag checks. One of my son’s toy racing cars once ended up in an odd seam inside my travel bag and I was detained twenty-minutes while airport security staff emptied all the contents of the bag in search of the elusive offending item. Other days, when flying clean-shaven in a business suit, I zipped through the security lines. I never gave the security staff a bad time—an extra pat-down really isn’t a big deal—but this undeclared profiling program bothered me because it was so plainly ineffective. A clean shave and tie was all that was needed to beat the profilers.
There is a time and place for profiling, albeit not racial profiling. Law enforcement and airport security already profile: Felons and people linked to dangerous organizations, even in absence of a particular concern, are singled out for higher scrutiny. And if law enforcement had a credible threat that an Arabic-looking terror suspect was likely to enter an airport on a given day, profiling Arabic-looking individuals that day would be in order. The concept of credible threat is the key, and it cannot be reasonably applied to Muslims as a whole.
There are over a billion and a half Muslims in the world, several hundred of whom are legitimate security threats. Even if we could deduce that fifty thousand Muslims are terrorists, that would mean only 1 in 30,000 Muslims are dangerous to U.S. air travelers. A much higher percentage of U.S. highway drivers text while driving; a much higher percentage of U.S. restaurants serve diseased food. Both represent a far greater threat to your safety than the Muslim who just boarded your plane
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