Racial Profiling

You'll remember Florida was where all the really posh Arab boys went for 9/11 flying lessons but STILL, did he not have Dance Music Conference written all over him? Sheesh! Talk about after the horse has bolted.

To ensure we Americans never offend anyone - particularly fanatics intent on killing us - airport screeners are not allowed to profile people. They will, however, continue to perform random searches of 80- year-old women, little kids, airline pilots with proper identification, Secret Service agents who are members of the President's security detail, and 85 year old Congressmen with metal hips. Let's pause a moment and take the following test...

In 1972, 11 Israeli athletes were killed at the Munich Olympics by: (a) Grandma Moses; (b) The night cleaning crew at Rockefeller Center; (c) Invaders from Mars; or (d) Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 1979, the U.S. embassy in Iran was taken over by: (a) Norwegians from the Lichen Herbarium of the University of Oslo; (b) Elvis; (c) A tour bus full of 80-year-old women; or (d) Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 1983, the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut was blown up by: (a) A pizza delivery boy; (b) Crazed feminists complaining that having to throw a grenade beyond its own burst radius in basic training was an unfair and sexist job requirement; (c) Geraldo Rivera making up for a slow news day; or (d) Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was bombed by: (a) Luca Brazzi, for not being given a part in "Godfather 2"; (b) The Tooth Fairy; (c) Butch and Sundance, who had a few sticks of dynamite left over from their train mission; or, (d) Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 1993, the World Trade Center was bombed by: (a) The entire cast of "Cats"; (b) Martha Stewart; (c) Cheese-crazed tourists from Wisconsin; or (d) Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 1998, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania a were bombed by: (a) Mr. Rogers; (b) Hillary, to distract attention from Wild Bill's women problems; (c) The World Wrestling Federation to promote its next villain: "Mustapha the Merciless"; or (d) Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40.

On 9/11/01, four airliners were hijacked and destroyed by: (a) Bugs Bunny, Wil E. Coyote, Daffy Duck, and Elmer Fudd. (b) The US Supreme Court, (c) Barney; or (d) Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40.

Hmmm... nope, ain't no patterns here. Darned if I know why we should ever even think about profiling.

More proof that Martha Stewart is EVIL.

The vast majority of school shootings are committed by students. I propose that students no longer be allowed in schools.

The vast majority of serial killings in the U.S. are committed by white males. I propose that the homes of white males be periodically searched to ensure the absence of bodies.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=95001349

This woman has her head on her shoulders! I realize the indiginities that even I or my family may have to go through if more americans were like her, but my patriotism to my new homeland (I'm a citizen!) is reflected in that I am willing to bear with it. Are the people writing against this not patriotic?

http://img.slate.com/media/31000/31829/Cop-ani.gif

I hate White people.

racist

5 years late on that

I got racially profiled following Sept 11th. This was back when they still had the reserve with unloaded assault rifles in airports. At the gate, they would always say there would be a 'random search.' Then everyone called would be brown or black.

I have no problem with some modes of profiling. Apparently, the Israelis use behavioral profiling to good effect, asking people point-blank questions etc. Richard Reed made a test flight on an Israeli airline, and the Israelis sent someone on the plane to watch him, because he seemed fishy. Read that somewhere at least. Comments?

Behavioral profiling is just basic police work, and provably effective. Racial profiling, not so much at all.

(The Israeli example is pretty useful here, since racial profiling -- in our sense, anyway -- just isn't an option for them, and so they've put a lot of effort into figuring out behavioral cues.)

At least he's embarrassed about it.

xxxxpost

Nabisco - right on. I live next to a Jewish hood in LA and it amazes me because people STILL have this stereotype that Jews are racist. Have these people ever looked at a Jewish person before?

By the way, I have a Japanese last name, so I'm not sure why I'm being racially profiled re: Sept. 11th. Read your fucking monitor.

I live next to a Jewish hood in LA and it amazes me because people STILL have this stereotype that Jews are racist. Have these people ever looked at a Jewish person before?

what does this even mean? You can tell Jews aren't racist by looking at them? zuh? I didn't know Jews had a reputation for being any more racist than any other ethnic group, that's news to me...

How do look at Jew and know they aren't racist?

lol xpost

You can tell Jews aren't racist by looking at them? zuh?

Isn't that how racism works? You look at a person and know the truth!

Possible answers:

Daily Show t-shirt
Birkenstocks
Public Enemy on their ipod

Well I mean racist or not, profiling every Muslim or Arab in a given spot in Israel just isn't gonna narrow the pool all that much.

(Which isn't to say that much broader, deeper, more official racial segregations aren't being practiced. At, say, checkpoints and whatnot. But that's just a whole grander level beyond police-type profiling of specific individuals.)

Isn't it fair to say that anyone who claims to be God's people should be killed and reunited with their heavenly father? Then, the rest of us can hang here on earth peacefully. Until someone wear sandals.

I mean flip-flops.

HEY WOW IS THIS THREAD GOING IN GREAT DIRECTIONS

i shut up now with bad joke

You forgot the amirite at the end of it.

You know what, you guys shut up with your preachy whiny little leftist voices. It's because Jews are often of mixed race, duh. They're not all white Aryan ... wait. At least, you can't categorize Jews as of one ethnic origin. Now get all lolz about that sluts.

Dude, non-white people be plenty racist in their own diverse and special ways, each one unique as a racist little snowflake.

Yeah, but allz I'm sayings is that them Jews iz be also of Middle-Eastern origin, so's it is hard to be sayinz that they'z is racists againstz themselvez LOLZZZZ!!!!!

the wife just found out she's 1/9th black last weekend since she's 1/3 Puerto Rican and PR's are apparently something, something and black. Black was the only one that stuck in my mind because I'm racist, amirite?

okay I am totally confused

and I'm bad at math

And I'm racist against dean and Shakey.

xpost -- confusion is right -- I don't even know what that means! Haha we call various Arabs "anti-Semites" all the time, despite the fact that Arabs are, like, Semites: organize the semantics however you like, but people of all stripes can be plenty racist when it suits them, no? I mean, in various cases you can say it's technically a "cultural" or "religious" distinction or whatever, or just long-running "ethnic conflict," but let's not split hairs. Group identity = someone be hating someone, somewhere.

Ah, found it: Spanish with traces of Taino Indian and Black influences.

No no no you're taking it way to far. My point was simply that Jews are stereotyped as being pasty white with allergies, when in fact they are a very non-homogeneous group in terms of skin color / ethnic origin. Many Jews who came to Israel were living and being persecuted in Egypt ect. and other Middle-Eastern states amirite? So it would be very difficult for them to racially profile, amirite?

hmm I dunno about a lot of that. Most of the original Israelis were escaping EUROPE not the middle east.

if anything Jews are non-homogenous in terms of physical attributes because we've been fuckin wandering around the world for 2 millenia miscegenating like crazy

yusuf islam is not a muslim extremist.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cd/Ericrudolph.jpg
ALLAHU AKBAR!!!!!

http://i11.tinypic.com/53ucxtl.gif
keep an eye out for this guy

Jeb. Thank you for deflecting attention from my anti-semantic remarks. I owe you a dance.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/d9/Shokoa.jpg/180px-Shokoa.jpg
DEATH TO THE GREAT SATAN

holy shit http://www.armyofgod.com/EricRudolphHomepage.html

http://i11.tinypic.com/53ucxtl.gifhttp://i11.tinypic.com/53ucxtl.gifhttp://i11.tinypic.com/53ucxtl.gif

so great

wtf ethan

Hi Jeb. Here's a refutation: the only part of "Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40" that is really relevant to any of those things is EXTREMISTS. I am very much in favor of profiling for extremists. Unfortunately, that's hard to tell by looking, which is why (e.g.) the Israelis have cooked up complex behavioral profiles.

What's less clear is how profiling for any of the other individual traits listed is helpful. Profiling for "males" wouldn't help at all. Profiling for "people between 17 and 40" wouldn't really help. So why, again, would profiling for "Muslim" do it? And how exactly do you figure that by looking?

I suppose it depends how the U.S. government defines what it is hoping to achieve by this. If they are explictly hoping to intercept not just any extremist who could be intending to enter the country and carry out acts of terrorism, but specifically hoping to intercept Islamic fundamentalists who could be intending to enter the country and carry out acts of terrorism, then you could argue that the profiling makes some kind of statistical sense in that if you interrogate randomly chosen people from Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or Algeria they are far more likely to be muslim (and therefore more likely to an Islamic fundamentalist) than randomly chosen people from Canada or Portugal or Japan. That's not to say it's the right policy in the first place, or that it would be significantly more effective.

I really think the nay side is splitting hairs on this one. What you keep pointing out time and time again is that the system is not perfect - it is indubitably so - and that it therefore sucks. But this whole conundrum isn't about how to establish a watertight border security, it's about how to use your limited resources, knowing that you cannot possibly check every passenger. No, "muslim male extremists" is not a race, and they do not all look alike, but that's not anyone's point. The point is that if you examine every muslim male within a certain age bracket, you can, as "Nasty, Brutish & Short" rightly points out, infer, from looking at historical data, that you eliminate a whole lot of risk with very little effort. The morality of singling out a specific group this way is questionable, of course, but that it's effective I don't doubt for a second.

Moreover, I'm not disputing that some people have murky motives for wanting to see this system in place, as this rather disquieting blog post exemplifies:

Racial Profiling These Guys? Why Not?

NBS: I think it's been demonstrated as a pretty sub-optimal way to use your resources. Also, the way you frame it is, weirdly enough, both already the case and kind of a bad idea. The idea of randomly scrutinizing people from certain nations already happens, at the level of issuing visas: Canadians can just drive right on in, whereas a Saudi who's spent odd pockets of time in Afghanistan or Pakistan is going to have a hell of a time sorting out a visa. As for the "bad idea" part: why exactly would we imagine that there aren't young-male-Muslim-extremists in Canada, or in the UK, or growing up right here in the US?

Nabisco OTM - the problem is the "profile" yr suggesting doesn't identify anything (how do you tell people are Muslims? or "extreme"? Physical characteristics do not betray these traits, and they can be lied about).

Well, whether there are extremists in the US has nothing to do with whether racial profiling should be conducted on airplanes.

X post

but that it's effective I don't doubt for a second.

it's not effective - the second law enforcement starts targeting males or Saudis or whatever, then they send Trinidadian women or whatever. get a clue - the Israeli approach is way more sensible and effective.

(or whatever)

Nabisco OTM - the problem is the "profile" yr suggesting doesn't identify anything (how do you tell people are Muslims? or "extreme"? Physical characteristics do not betray these traits, and they can be lied about).

Jeb would clearly argue that people who 'look' Middle-Eastern are more likely to be Muslim, and moreover, more likely to have extremists points of view toward the US. Can you refute this?

xpost

The point is that if you examine every muslim male within a certain age bracket, you can, as "Nasty, Brutish & Short" rightly points out, infer, from looking at historical data, that you eliminate a whole lot of risk with very little effort.

Jeb you're just ASSERTING that this is true, against voluminous evidence to the contrary. (Also that is definitively not what NBS just said.) For one thing (and please do try to wrap your head around this), you cannot examing "every Muslim male" without a way to tell who is a Muslim. For another, such specific profiling just makes your security very easy to figure out and circumvent, leaving you wide open to, you know, women, older people, people who don't look as "Muslim" as whatever standards you're working with, or whole other types of security risks.

Once again: we already have one terrorism test-lab called Israel, where they've had decent success isolating particular abnormal behaviors that are much better indicators of a threat than any kind of ethnic-identity stuff. To defend racial profiling in the face of evidence that it's a worse idea -- worse on a flat-out practical level -- is kind of ridiculous.

Jeb would clearly argue that people who 'look' Middle-Eastern are more likely to be Muslim, and moreover, more likely to have extremists points of view toward the US. Can you refute this?

Absolutely - I guarantee you any list of characteristics comprising the Middle Eastern "look" will apply to people who are most likely not Muslim (like, say, those Jews you were going on about upthread - or do you remember your own words)

I should just let nabisco handle this shouldn't I

like, say, those Jews you were going on about upthread - or do you remember your own words

Alright, alright, don't get all testy Shakey damn.

people who 'look' Middle-Eastern are more likely to be Muslim

In my experience of the US,

(a) people who Americans think "look Middle Eastern" are most likely to be Hindu or Sikh, and

(b) and people who actually are Muslim are statistically unlikely to "look" mid-Eastern, since they are quite often going to be from places like Indonesia or east Africa

The London train bombers were Eritreans. The pricipals in the recent JFK plot were Guyanese. Please get over the idea that there is an identifiable enemy to work with here.

sorry humansuit I'm all uptight cuz my mother's been yelling at me and I can't find my inhaler

I'm just saying that whether behavioral profiling is better than racial profiling is better is one argument, but whether racial profiling would be better than random profiling is a different matter. Moreover, behavioral profiling might be augmented by racial profiling.

I'm not making an argument one way or the other but one must explore the model following a logical, unbiased progression. I think that Nabisco is doing a fine job.

sorry humansuit I'm all uptight cuz my mother's been yelling at me and I can't find my inhaler

LOL. Nice one.

Jeb would clearly argue that people who 'look' Middle-Eastern are more likely to be Muslim, and moreover, more likely to have extremists points of view toward the US.

The London train bombers were Eritreans.

I should add that I haven't looked into the Israeli way of handling these matters. They may well have a better system in place, and if so it should be adopted by the U.S.

The London train bombers were Eritreans

British-born of Pakistani descent, mostly, with one guy who was a convert of Jamaican descent (I think). The second wave of ('alleged') failed bombers were Somalians.

er, xpost

it's very hard for the evil-doers to find someone outside the narrow demographic outlined above to carry out their evil deeds.

what, you mean someone like a rich white kid from Marin County? Or a filipino gang member from Chicago? Or a bunch of Guyanese guys in New York? wtf are you talking about

it isn't hard it's fucking EASY - Islamic extremism has become the de facto ideology of the disaffected, it cuts across all racial and economic lines (and has much the same appeal as radical marxism did several decades ago).

Pardon me, yes, not the main train bombing -- the later attempt. At least one Eritrean and one Somali. People from neither of these nations "look Middle Eastern."

they do to us white folks!!

heyo!

(correction to my own post - Padilla is Puerto Rican, not Filipino. Good thing I'm not responsible for racially profiling anybody eh amirite)

Actually, I'd like to contradict myself:

I suppose it depends how the U.S. government defines what it is hoping to achieve by this. If they are explictly hoping to intercept not just any extremist who could be intending to enter the country and carry out acts of terrorism, but specifically hoping to intercept Islamic fundamentalists who could be intending to enter the country and carry out acts of terrorism, then you could argue that the profiling makes some kind of statistical sense in that if you interrogate randomly chosen people from Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or Algeria they are far more likely to be muslim (and therefore more likely to an Islamic fundamentalist) than randomly chosen people from Canada or Portugal or Japan. That's not to say it's the right policy in the first place, or that it would be significantly more effective.

This assumes that all muslims are equally likely to be Islamic fundamentalists irrespective of their nationality. However, some people have argued that people who have converted are far more likely to be radicalised. If you accept that, then you could say that a randomly chosen muslim from an overwhelmingly non-muslim country is more likely to be a convert than a randomly chosen muslim from an overwhelmingly muslim country, and therefore more likely to be 'dangerous'. But as nabisco and others have said quite clearly, there's no way of telling someone's religion from their passport, so there's no way of identifying such people. And choosing people on the basis of the country they come from almost certainly means that you are able to increase your chances of interrogating someone who is a muslim, but that it doesn't logically follow that they are more likely to be an Islamic fundamentalist.

plz to excuse random syntax errors

move argument vs contradict argument :0

Portland Police department can go fuck themselves.

Sorry, Rev. What happened? (If you feel like sharing.)

The Portland Police Department is shot through with reprehensible, swaggering assholes with two-handled truncheons on their hips and a shiny badge behind which they hide their festering souls. If they fucked themselves they'd give birth to swarms of insectile offspring.

I was down there for a few days, and yesterday I was walking to the waterfront and cut through a paid parking lot (which only had like two cars in it). Suddenly this unmarked police car rolled up beside me and this pig gets all up in my business asking me where I'm going, what's my name, what's my date of birth, are you on papers. I didn't even know what that meant and he clarified that he's asking if I've ever been arrested, and tells me I need to "walk on the sidewalks." He's like "ok" and I move on and while I'm waiting for the crosswalk he comes back and asks me what state I have ID in and have I ever been arrested in Washington. It's like fuck you, I just told you I've never been arrested. That applies to Washington too. I'm here having my vacation trying to have a good time and now my mood is all fucked up because I have police harassing me for some bullshit racist reasons I can't even discern. Sorry I'm not part of your fucking dragnet like you wish. Ugh.

Now I'm just wondering what if I HAD been arrested at some point in the past? Would that have been grounds to arrest me again on some trumped-up bullshit? That cop sounded so thirsty for an excuse to further inconvenience me.

That cop sounded so thirsty for an excuse to further inconvenience me keep me in my place.

fixed

well yeah

Ugh, horrible shit.

gross

Is there ever any point in asking for their name and badge number to at least make them worry you'll file a complaint, or is that just going to lead to more attitude?

ugh thats awful, rev

Rev, that sucks. I think in those situations it's best to try to memorise the badge number in the same way you'd memorise the license plate number of a hit-and-run driver. If you did this, report him.

unfortunately all too typical for the Portland PD, Aimless OTM. Every year or two they get their asses handed to them in a lawsuit but they just keep on being horrible.

the Pacific NW seems to be really big on using downtown "exclusion zones" to keep out anyone who has an arrest record going back, well, however long they pass the law for. I think in Eugene it's 90 days? sounds like this cop was just being a jerk as usual.

I wanted him to leave me alone as quickly as possible more than I wanted his badge number.