Ethics News
Racial Profiling
>> = Important Articles; ** = Major Articles
Supplemental Articles in a separate file (click here to read)
**Is Profiling Racist? (townhall.com, 100804)
**Racial profiling (townhall.com, 061220)
**Editorial: The need for profiling (National Post, 100107)
**U.S. Intensifies Air Screening for Fliers From 14 Nations (Paris International Herald, 100104)
**The Right Kind of Profiling (Paris International Herald, 100104)
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Walter E. Williams (black economics professor)
We live in a world of imperfect and costly information, and people seek to economize on information costs in a variety of ways. If we don’t take that fact into account, we risk misidentifying and confusing one type of human behavior with another. Let’s look at it.
Pima Indians of Arizona have the world’s highest diabetes rates. With knowledge that his patient is a Pima Indian, it would probably be a best practice for a physician to order more thorough blood glucose tests to screen for diabetes. Prostate cancer is nearly twice as common among black men as white men. It would also be a best practice for a physician to be attentive to — even risk false positive PSAs — prostate cancer among his black patients. What about physicians who order routine mammograms for their 40-year and older female patients but not their male patients? The American Cancer Society predicts that about 400 men will die of breast cancer this year.
Because of a correlation between race, sex and disease, the physician is using a cheap-to-observe characteristic, such as race or sex, as an estimate for a more costly-to-observe characteristic, the presence of a disease. The physician is practicing both race and sex profiling. Does that make the physician a racist or sexist? Should he be brought up on charges of racial discrimination because he’s guessing that his black patients are more likely to suffer from prostate cancer? Should sex discrimination or malpractice suits be brought against physicians who prescribe routine mammograms for their female patients but not their male patients? You say, “Williams, that would be lunacy!”
Is an individual’s race or sex useful for guessing about other unseen characteristics? Suppose gambling becomes legal for an Olympic event such as the 100-meter sprint. I wouldn’t place a bet on an Asian or white runner. Why? Blacks who trace their ancestry to West Africa, including black Americans, hold more than 95% of the top times in sprinting. That’s not to say an Asian or white can never win but I know the correlations and I’m playing the odds. If women were permitted to be in the sprint event with men, I’d still put my money on a black male. Does that make me a sexist as well as a racist?
What about when a black hails a taxicab and the driver passes him up and picks up a white passenger down the street? Is that racism? Many people assume that it is but it might not be any different from a physician using race and sex as an estimator for some other characteristic. Ten years ago, a black D.C. commissioner warned cabbies, most of whom are black, against picking up dangerous-looking passengers. She described dangerous-looking as a “young black guy ... with shirttail hanging down longer than his coat, baggy pants, unlaced tennis shoes.” She also warned cabbies to stay away from low-income black neighborhoods. Cabbies themselves have developed other profiling criteria.
There is no sense of justice or decency that a law-abiding black person should suffer the indignity being passed up. At the same time, a taxicab driver has a right to earn a living without being robbed, assaulted and possibly murdered. One of the methods to avoid victimization is to refuse to pick up certain passengers in certain neighborhoods or passengers thought to be destined for certain neighborhoods. Again, a black person is justifiably angered when refused service but that anger should be directed toward the criminals who prey on cabbies.
Not every choice based on race represents racism and if you think so, you risk misidentifying and confusing human behavior. The Rev. Jesse Jackson once said, “There is nothing more painful for me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery — then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”
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By Walter E. Williams [KH: black]
Charges of racial, religious and ethnic profiling swirl in the wake of US Airways’ removal of six imams. According to police reports, the men made anti-American statements, were praying and chanting “Allah,” refused the pilot’s requests to disembark for additional screening and asked for seat-belt extensions for no obvious reason. Three of the men had no checked baggage and only one-way tickets.
According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), five of the men have retained lawyers and are probably going to bring a discrimination lawsuit against US Airways.
Racial profiling controversy is nothing new. For a number of years, black Americans have made charges of racial profiling by police and store personnel who might give them extra scrutiny. Clever phrases have emerged, such as “driving while black” and now “flying while Muslim,” but they don’t help much in terms of understanding. Let’s apply some economic analysis to the issue.
God, or some other omniscient being, would never racially profile. Why? Since He is all-knowing, He’d know who is and is not a terrorist or a criminal. We humans are not all-knowing. While a god would have perfect and complete information about everything, we humans have less than perfect and incomplete information. That means we must use substitutes such as guesses and hunches for certain kinds of information. It turns out that some physical attributes are highly correlated with other attributes that are less easily, or more costly, observed.
Let’s look at a few, and the associated “profiling,” that cause little or no controversy. Mortality rates for cardiovascular diseases were approximately 30% higher among black adults than among white adults. The Pima Indians of Arizona have the world’s highest known diabetes rates. Prostate cancer is nearly twice as common among black men as white men. Would anyone bring racial profiling charges against a doctor who routinely ordered more frequent blood tests and prostate screening among his black patients and more glucose tolerance tests for his Pima Indian patients? Of course, God wouldn’t have to do that because He’d know for sure which patient was more prone to cardiovascular disease, prostate cancer and diabetes.
It is clear, whether we like it or not, or want to say it or not, that there is a strong correlation between terrorist acts and being a Muslim, and being black and high rates of crime. That means if one is trying to deter terrorism and in some cases capture a criminal, he would expend greater investigatory resources on Muslims and blacks. A law-abiding Muslim who’s given extra airport screening or a black who’s stopped by the police is perfectly justified in being angry, but with whom should he be angry? I think a Muslim should be angry with those who’ve made terrorism and Muslim synonymous and blacks angry with those who’ve made blacks and crime synonymous. The latter is my response to the insulting sounds of car doors locking sometimes when I’m crossing a street in downtown Washington, D.C., or when taxi drivers pass me by.
It would be a serious misallocation of resources if airport security intensively screened everyone. After all, intensively screening someone who had a near zero probability of being a terrorist, such as an 80-year-old woman using a walker, would not only be a waste but it would take resources away from screening a person with a much higher probability of being a terrorist.
You say, “Williams, are you justifying religious and racial profiling?” No. I’m not justifying anything any more than I’d try to justify Einstein’s special law of relativity. I’m trying to explain a phenomenon. By the way, I think some of the airport screening is grossly stupid, but I’m at peace with the Transportation Security Administration. They have their rules, and I have mine. One of mine is to minimize my association with idiocy. Thus, I no longer fly commercial.
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Yes, the so-called “naked” scanners — 44 of which will be installed at Canadian airports by spring — are intrusive. While passengers need not fear that they take a picture of a passenger’s body under his or her clothes, they do give screeners a pretty good idea of one’s body’s shape — the sort of image once reserved for spouses, doctors and locker-room chums.
But the revealing nature of the images isn’t their biggest drawback. The problem is that they perpetuate our obsession with keeping bad things off airlines —guns, blades, explosives, etc. — rather than keeping off bad people.
Authorities don’t need to search every passenger for 100 ml of hand lotion just because a cadre of Islamic extremists in Britain planned to use sports drinks and toothpaste to blow up as many as 10 jetliners simultaneously in 2006. They don’t need to have every elderly lady take off her shoes for X-raying, either, or have every rotund Caucasian male remove his belt and hobble through the metal detector with one hand on his waistband.
What is needed is profiling of passengers — their behaviour, travel history, sex, ethnicity, travel-companion status and outward religious aspect. Men are far more likely to be terrorists than women, so men should receive greater scrutiny. Young adults are more likely to be terrorists than the aged. Religious Muslims who’ve travelled frequently to Yemen or Nigeria or Pakistan are statistically more likely to be terrorists than Sikhs, nuns and Quakers. Men travelling alone are more likely to be terrorists than men travelling with their children. No one should be treated as a presumptive terrorist. But only the wilfully blind can ignore the fact that almost the entire terrorist threat originates with a small subset of the travelling population.
The federal government’s announcement on Tuesday that it will step up security for flights going from Canada to the United States was a mixed effort, then. On the one hand, it again focuses on interdicting dangerous objects, which is hit-and-miss at best. But it does, for the first time, also acknowledge that more profiling is necessary.
Ottawa will spend $11-million installing full-body scanners at airports in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Halifax, the cities from which most U.S.-bound Canadian flights originate. To what end, though? U.S. security experts have told several American newspapers that even these naked scanners would not have detected the explosives in Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab’s shorts when he boarded a Detroit-bound flight in Amsterdam on Christmas Day. Only thermal imaging scanners could have done that. So once again, federal officials are reacting to a terror threat by inconveniencing the travelling public in a way that does little to heighten security.
On the other hand, Transportation Minister John Baird will also instruct Canadian airport security screeners to begin using “passenger behaviour observation” techniques (i. e., profiling) for any number of unusual behaviours such as excessive sweating, anxious movements and the wearing of clothing too heavy for the weather. Anyone exhibiting these behaviours would then be singled out for further screening, such as an interview with a screener or a full-body scan.
This is not that different from what screeners are doing now, but it is one of the clearest indications yet that Ottawa recognizes that not all passengers are an equal threat to air safety.
The federal government needs to go several steps further, though: It needs to look beyond mere behaviour, and match screening efforts to the groups in society that contain the most dangerous radicals.
Right now, of course, that principle leads us to profiling young Muslim males, since nearly all the successful and unsuccessful attacks carried out against airliners in recent decades have come from this group. But it should be emphasized that this is an equal opportunity principle: If Jews start blowing up aircraft, then we should start targeting anyone with a yarmulka, a Jewish name or an Israeli stamp on their passport. Ditto for anyone named Singh, if a reprise of Air India Flight 182 seems likely. And if the drug gangs, kidnappers and terrorists of Mexico start infiltrating our airspace, well then, Mr. Gomez, please step to one side and raise your arms.
It goes without saying that 99.999% of Muslim males are no more of a threat to hijack or blow up a plane than anyone on this editorial board. But security isn’t about the 99.999%. It’s about the other 0.001%. There can be no indulgence of political correctness when it comes to protecting our airspace. Profiling must match the threat.
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WASHINGTON — Citizens of 14 nations, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, who are flying to the United States will be subjected indefinitely to the intense screening at airports worldwide that was imposed after the Christmas Day bombing plot, Obama administration officials announced Sunday.
But American citizens, and most others who are not flying through those 14 nations on their way to the United States, will no longer automatically face the full range of intensified security that was imposed after the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight, officials said.
The change represents an easing of the immediate response to the attempted bombing of a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit that had been in place the past week. But the restrictions remain tougher than the rules that were in effect before the Dec. 25 incident. And the action on Sunday further establishes a global security system that treats people differently based on what country they are from, evoking protests from civil rights groups.
Citizens of Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria, countries that are considered “state sponsors of terrorism,” as well as those of “countries of interest” — including Afghanistan, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen — will face the special scrutiny, officials said.
Passengers holding passports from those nations, or taking flights that originated or passed through any of them, will be required to undergo full-body pat downs and will face extra scrutiny of their carry-on bags before they can board planes to the United States.
In some countries that have more advanced screening equipment, travelers will also be required to pass through so-called whole-body scanners that can look beneath clothing for hidden explosives or weapons, or may be checked with a device that can find tiny traces of explosives.
On Sunday, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain announced that whole-body scanners would be introduced in that country’s airports. Officials in Amsterdam announced last week that they would begin using the scanners on passengers bound for the United States.
Many, though not all, other passengers coming to the United States will face similar measures, but that screening will be done randomly or if there is some reason to believe that a particular passenger might present a threat, officials said.
The changes should speed up boarding of international flights bound for the United States while still increasing security beyond the standard X-rays of carry-on bags and metal-detector checks of all passengers.
The changes will mean that any citizen of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia will for the first time be patted down automatically before boarding any flight to the United States. Even if that person has lived in a country like Britain for decades, he now will be subject to these extra security checks.
Nawar Shora, the legal director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, says the rule wrongly implies that all citizens of certain nations are suspect.
“I understand there needs to be additional security in light of what was attempted on Christmas Day,” Mr. Shora said, adding that he intended to file a formal protest on Monday. “But this is extreme and very dangerous. All of a sudden people are labeled as being related to terrorism just because of the nation they are from.”
In the United States, an order for a “second screening” has already been in effect for a dozen countries.
But the requirement often does not have much of an impact because most passengers traveling domestically in the United States use driver’s licenses — not passports — when passing through checkpoints, so officials do not know their nationality and there is less of a chance that they would receive extra attention.
The addition of Nigeria, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to the “country of interest” list marks the first time that citizens of those countries will be subject to automatic additional screening for flights to the United States.
Charles Oy, 28, of Chicago is an American who was born in Nigeria. He said that he detected heightened security over the weekend — not in Nigeria but upon his arrival Sunday at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. He was one of a few passengers taken aside for individual interviews, and his bags and passport were examined.
The suspect arrested in the Northwest Airlines episode, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, was Nigerian, but Mr. Oy said that the added scrutiny did not leave him discouraged. “I feel it is very isolated, and is something not characteristic of Nigeria,” he said. “I had no particular feelings of unpleasantness. I understand it is part of the world we live in. I factor all that into my traveling. If it happens, I roll with it.”
A homeland security official said that the Obama administration did not consider this move a step in the direction of racial profiling, which the Transportation Security Administration has said it has long tried to avoid.
“Out of abundance of caution and based on the latest intelligence in this evolving threat environment, additional screening measures are necessary to keep transportation safe,” the official said, asking that she not be identified by name as she was not authorized to address the question on the record.
Domestically, passengers traveling in the United States may notice more canine bomb-detection teams or face occasional extra checks of carry-on bags. Additional behavioral detection officials are also in airports to observe passengers for any signs that might offer a hint of a plot. But there have been no comprehensive changes in screening at domestic airports.
David Castelveter, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, the airlines’ trade organization, said the group had been “closely coordinating” the enhanced security measures with customers’ convenience in mind. “I believe we accomplished that,” he said Sunday.
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Sheldon Jacobson
Spending billions of dollars on screening the wrong people uses up finite resources.
Sheldon H. Jacobson is a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has researched the design and operation of effective aviation security systems and operations since 1996.
Since 9/11, we’ve spent billions of dollars to improve aviation security. Some believe that we can spend our way to a solution. In this case, more money (and technologies) may actually be making us less secure.
If we keep focusing on stopping terrorist tactics rather than stopping the terrorists themselves, the aviation security system will never reach an acceptable level of security.
More screening can actually result in less security by directing security attention and resources (which by definition, are finite) onto people who are not a threat, which in turn moves such attention and resources away from people who are a threat.
For any one non-threat person, there is a near-negligible impact on security attention and resources. However, when this impact is accumulated over millions of passengers who fly each year, the effect does indeed become measurable. In essence, by spending billions of dollars on the wrong people, we are not spending billions of dollars on the right people.
It takes only one terrorist success for the system to fail. The terrorist tactics will also constantly change and evolve, but the terrorists will not. We need to employ technologies, procedures, and information that allow us to keep terrorists off of airplanes, but the challenge is achieving this within acceptable societal norms.
One solution is to use information about passengers (voluntarily provided and readily assessable) to eliminate those who have negligible risk factors, which should be the case for 60 to 70% of passengers. Then apply state-of-the art technologies for the remaining pool of passengers, for which less information is known, and subject them to the highest level of security screening, and in some cases, not allow them to fly.
We can call this behavioral profiling, information profiling, or whatever we wish. However, until we use security resources appropriately, we will never achieve a secure air system.
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Supplemental Articles in a separate file (click here to read)