Ethics News
Racial Profiling (Supplement)
Maryland Settles Decade-Old Racial Profiling Lawsuit (Foxnews, 030402)
Muslims face extra checks in new travel crackdown (Times Online, 060815)
Americans back anti-terrorism racial profiling: poll (Reuters, 060829)
Spanish-Language Radio Station Slams Police for Describing Suspect as ‘Hispanic’ (Foxnews, 071114)
Driving While Liberal: The racial-profiling myth refuses to die. (National Review Online, 071218)
Paris Police Use Racial Profiling, Study Finds (Paris, International Herald, 090629)
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ANNAPOLIS, Md. — Maryland approved Wednesday the settlement of a 10-year-old racial profiling lawsuit against the State Police that mandates new training for troopers and closer monitoring of traffic stops.
With a 2-1 vote, the Board of Public Works, responsible for state spending, signed off on the $325,000 settlement. Gov. Robert Ehrlich, Comptroller William Donald Schaefer and Treasurer Nancy K. Kopp constitute the board.
“After 10 years, there has been far too much litigation and far too much politics,” Ehrlich said. “We’re going to put this behind us today.”
The agreement has been on hold since early January at the request of incoming Gov. Ehrlich so that he and the new State Police Superintendent, Col. Edward T. Norris, could review it. In the meantime, some lawmakers and civil rights groups pressured board members to have it put back on the board’s agenda for approval.
Ehrlich was agitated that the facts of profiling had been “misreported.”
“The issue is about searches, not stops,” he said.
Kopp, who always favored the decree, acknowledged there was a problem, but still pledged her support to State Police.
“I am second to no one in my respect for our troopers,” she said. “I find it impossible to believe that we can’t do our job without profiling.”
Norris said he refused to sign the settlement when he first took office because he was unfamiliar with the document.
“I didn’t feel comfortable doing it . . . and there were things I didn’t like,” Norris said. “I’m happy it’s signed and we can move forward.”
The decree outlined conditions for police behavior, including retraining State Police, installing audio-visual equipment, and handing out informational brochures.
“I agreed to sign this because there is a lot in it that protects police,” he said.
Schaefer voted against the settlement, but only because he opposed paying legal fees. He said he actually favored the rest of the settlement.
“I’m against profiling, that shouldn’t happen,” he said. “If I were State Police I would not stop anyone on I-95 from now on because it would jeopardize any promotion.”
Schaefer cracked that the state was getting a bargain and only the State Police will pay, adding, “I was one of the motivators for holding this up because it was wrong.”
It was the appropriate time to end racial profiling, said Democratic state Sen. Lisa A Gladden, a major proponent of the decree who continued to push the issue onto the board’s agenda.
“We’ve come to a great day and it’s appropriate,” she said. “I feel as if the struggle will continue and that this doesn’t put an end to profiling. But the governor is putting race in front of the camera and that is a good thing.”
Gary Rodwell, formerly of Baltimore and one of the original litigants in the case, made the trek down from Philadelphia to watch the board.
“This is a historic moment,” he said. “We’re hoping that what we do here in Maryland stands as a model for other states.”
The suit was prompted by a 1992 incident in which State Police pulled over black defense lawyer Robert L. Wilkins. Wilkins, who refused a search of his car while driving in Cumberland with his family, filed the initial suit, igniting the 10-year legal battle.
At the time Wilkins was pulled over, a “confidential” police document instructed troopers to target black drivers on Interstate 95 because they were suspected “dealers and couriers” of crack cocaine.
While Wilkins won his initial suit in 1995, its provisions were never enforced, prompting more litigation that resulted in Wednesday’s settlement.
“I am happy about it but this is the second time I have been through this lawsuit,” Wilkins said. “I am not happy that I have to spend my time and my money on this issue.”
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ALTHOUGH NEW YORK CITY police announced last week that they would scale back the increased security measures that followed the recent terrorism scare, the subway terror alert highlighted two basic facts. The first is that the terrorists would like to strike our mass transit system; the second, is that this system is still highly vulnerable. The most telling comment in the October 6 press conference in which city officials announced their resolve to safeguard the subways came from Mayor Bloomberg: “We will spare no resource; we will spare no expense.” While intended as a statement of determination, Bloomberg’s words instead accentuated the ineffectiveness of New York’s anti-terror policing. New York could spare resources, spare expenses, and make passengers safer if it used terrorist profiling.
The morning after New York increased its subway security, the San Francisco Chronicle published an op-ed by Mike German defending New York’s use of purely random bag searches rather than profiling. The op-ed’s weaknesses are emblematic of the overall case against profiling.
The argument for profiling is simple and compelling: If our last line of defense is searching bags before riders enter the subway, our searches should target the passengers who are most likely to be terrorists. Only through intelligently targeted searches can we have a reasonable chance of disrupting terrorist plots. This means we should try to figure out how terrorists look and act—and that law enforcement should be trained in taking these factors into account.
Because this case is intuitive and hard to refute (why would we treat, say, U.S. senators the same as Mohamed Atta?), the opponents of profiling seemingly turn to autopilot when arguing against it, throwing out every claim that could possibly support their position with little critical filter. German does this when he argues that completely random bag searches are just as effective as profiling. And his case begins with the creation of a false dichotomy, in which one option is the most awkward kind of profiling done solely on the basis of race, and the other option is random searches.
Thankfully, other choices lie along the spectrum between these two extremes. A truly effective system of terrorist profiling would not look solely at a person’s race in determining whether extra scrutiny is justified. Rather, a range of factors—including gender, age, dress, and behavior—can be used to identify the most likely terrorists. Surely there can be no argument against considering these non-racial factors.
While police can make good use of statistics to focus searches on the most likely terrorists, German makes bad use of statistics in an attempt to prove otherwise. He first spends considerable space demonstrating that most Muslims in America are not Arab. While true, this doesn’t prove the inefficacy of racial profiling, which is not synonymous with “Arab profiling.”
German then argues that racial profiling would “miss Muslims of European descent (2.1%) and white American Muslims (1.6%) such as Adam Gadahn, who is actively being sought by the FBI for possible connections to terrorist threats against the United States.” It’s true that al Qaeda has managed to recruit some people who fall outside the general racial profile, but there are two problems with German’s argument. First, under an effective profiling system, resources would be concentrated on races that are statistically most likely to be jihadist terrorists, but other races would not be ignored completely. (Indeed, if we learned that al Qaeda had recruited more whites, we’d adjust the applicable profile and search more whites.)
More to the point, the fact that the terrorist profiles won’t be perfect doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t use them. Even if it were true that terrorist profiling results in too few whites being searched, the present system results in a complete misallocation of resources because it draws no distinction between a 12-year-old Japanese schoolkid and a 25-year-old Arab. The fact that terrorist profiling is an imprecise art doesn’t mean we should resign ourselves to an approach we know to be ineffective—particularly when the public’s safety is at stake.
German’s final statistical argument is his most bizarre and off-base. He argues that racial profiling would “also miss terrorists from the far right and far left, as well as animal-rights extremists and eco-terrorists, who are overwhelmingly white.” He claims that these groups cannot be ignored because there have been “almost 60 right-wing terrorist plots over the last 10 years and, according to the FBI, right-wing extremists are not even as great a domestic threat as radical animal-rights and environmental terrorists.” This argument is every bit as irrelevant as it first appears. The question is not how many terrorist plots various groups have planned over the past 10 years; it is who’s targeting New York’s subway system right now. The answer is, of course, jihadist groups.
The bottom line is that one cannot sustain the argument that purely random bag searches are as effective as training police to identify potential terrorists by taking into account the wealth of information we have on how they look and act. But while German’s argument that racial profiling is no better than the present system is confused and weak, he raises one legitimate concern: being racially profiled can be a humiliating and alienating experience. For this reason, it’s important that a premium be placed on training officers to be polite and courteous in their interactions with passengers, so that nobody is made to feel guilty until proven innocent.
But even with this argument, German overplays his hand, arguing that “it’s not just the public humiliation that makes racial profiling wrong; it’s the reinforcement of the false impression that all Muslims are potential terrorists.” Is that really the signal that would be sent by terrorist profiling? I submit that it is not. Police will be well aware that the vast majority of Muslims they interact with wouldn’t even consider taking part in a terrorist attack. And what signal do we send with the converse policy, where we don’t even try to improve our odds of breaking up a terrorist plot? The signal we send is that we’re weak, that we’re so concerned about sensitivities and offending others that we won’t take the steps necessary to protect our citizens from death. And we send the signal that our defenses are easily penetrated—a signal that, sadly, isn’t far off the mark.
We can continue with the present “spare no resource” approach in times of crisis. But we’d spare more resources, and be safer for it, if terrorist profiling were one of the tools in our anti-terror arsenal.
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is a Washington, D.C.-based counterterrorism consultant and attorney.
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THE Government is discussing with airport operators plans to introduce a screening system that allows security staff to focus on those passengers who pose the greatest risk.
The passenger-profiling technique involves selecting people who are behaving suspiciously, have an unusual travel pattern or, most controversially, have a certain ethnic or religious background.
The system would be much more sophisticated than simply picking out young men of Asian appearance. But it would cause outrage in the Muslim community because its members would be far more likely to be selected for extra checks.
Officials at the Department for Transport (DfT) have discussed the practicalities of introducing such a system with airport operators, including BAA. They believe that it would be more effective at identifying potential terrorists than the existing random searches.
They also say that it would greatly reduce queues at secur-ity gates, which caused lengthy delays at London airports yesterday for the fifth day running. Heathrow and Gatwick were worst affected, cancelling 69 and 27 flights respectively. BAA gave warning yesterday that the disruption would continue for the rest of the week.
Passengers are now allowed to take one small piece of hand luggage on board but security staff are still having to search 50 per cent of travellers. Airports have also been ordered to search twice as many hand luggage items as a week ago.
BAA was criticised yesterday for failing to commit itself to recruiting more security staff and for claiming that its existing 6,000 staff at seven airports would be able to handle the extra searches. Tony Douglas, the chief executive of Heathrow, said that X-ray screening of hand luggage would be much faster under the new rules on size and contents, leaving staff free to carry out more searches.
The new measures, which include a ban on taking any liquids through checkpoints, are expected to remain in place for months. A DfT source said it was difficult to see how the restrictions could be relaxed if terrorists now had the capability to make liquid bombs.
The DfT has been considering passenger profiling for a year but, until last week, the disadvantages were thought to outweigh the advantages. A senior aviation industry source said: “The DfT is ultra-sensitive about this and won’t say anything publicly because of political concerns about being accused of racial stereotyping.”
Three days before last week’s arrests, the highest-ranking Muslim police officer in Britain gave warning that profiling techniques based on physical appearance were already causing anger and mistrust among young Muslims. Tarique Ghaffur, an assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said: “We must think long and hard about the causal factors of anger and resentment.
“There is a very real danger that the counter-terrorism label is also being used by other law-enforcement agencies to the effect that there is a real risk of criminalising minority communities.”
Sir Rod Eddington, former chief executive of British Airways, criticised the random nature of security searches. He said that it was irrational to subject a 75-year-old grandmother to the same checks as a 25-year-old man who had just paid for his ticket with cash.
Philip Baum, an aviation security consultant, said that profiling should focus on ruling out people who obviously posed no risk rather than picking out Asian or Arabs.
A DfT spokesman refused to make any comment or answer any questions on profiling.
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BOSTON (Reuters) - Most Americans expect a terrorist attack on the United States in the next few months and support the screening of people who look “Middle Eastern” at airports and train stations, a poll showed on Tuesday.
The Quinnipiac University Polling Institute said 62% of Americans were “very worried” or “somewhat worried” that terrorists would strike the nation in the next few months while 37% were “not too worried” or “not worried at all.”
The poll of 1,080 voters, conducted August 17-23, comes as many Americans are jittery after British authorities foiled a plot to blow up planes but is broadly in line with other surveys on expectations for another attack since September 11.
By a 60% to 37% margin, respondents said authorities should single out people who look “Middle Eastern” for security screening at locations such as airports and train stations — a finding that drew sharp criticism by civil liberties groups.
“It’s an unfortunate by-product to the fear and hysteria we’re hearing in many quarters,” said Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights and advocacy organization.
“It’s one of those things that makes people think they are doing something to protect themselves when they’re not. They’re in fact producing more insecurity by alienating the very people whose help is necessary in the war on terrorism,” he said.
Quinnipiac’s director of polling, Maurice Carroll, said he was surprised by the apparent public support for racial profiling. “What’s the motivation there — is it bigotry, or is it fear or is it practicality?” he said.
Civil liberties groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union say racial profiling has been on the rise since the September 11 attacks. Arab and Muslim men are often profiled for investigation and Sikhs have frequently been mistakenly perceived as being of Middle Eastern origin.
The ACLU last week accused security officials at New York’s John F. Kennedy airport of racially profiling Muslims.
PEARL HARBOR VS SEPT. 11
“You really need some indication of individualized concern before you target someone for closer examination,” said Dennis Parker, an ACLU director. “One of the reasons for the U.S. Constitution was to protect the rights of minorities.”
The poll also said most Americans rank the September 11 attacks as more significant than the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Fifty-six percent cited September 11, while the Japanese attack that brought the United States into World War Two was named most important by 33% of the survey, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 3%age points.
But the poll shows a deep split between young and old. September 11 is named most important by 72% of Americans aged 18 to 34, but the proportion falls to 42% for people over 65. Some advised caution with the findings.
“People have fresh memories of 9-11 and many don’t have any memories at all of Pearl Harbor, and those who do don’t have fresh memories of it,” said Bruce Schulman, a Boston University professor of history and American studies.
“We also feel pretty confident that we know how the results of Pearl Harbor turned out, and we certainly don’t know what the consequences of 9-11 are going to turn out to be,” he said.
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One of six Muslim imams pulled from a US Airways flight in Minneapolis last night by federal authorities is affiliated with a Hamas-linked organization and acknowledged a connection to Osama bin Laden in the 1990s.
Omar Shahin, who served as a spokesman for the clerics, is a representative of the Kind Hearts Organization, which had its assets frozen by the U.S. Treasury pending an investigation, notes Islam scholar Robert Spencer on his weblog JihadWatch
Treasury spokesman Stuart Levey in February said KindHearts “is the progeny of Holy Land Foundation and Global Relief Foundation, which attempted to mask their support for terrorism behind the façade of charitable giving.”
The imams had attended a conference in Minneapolis of the North American Imams Federation, said Shahin, who is president of the group.
“They took us off the plane, humiliated us in a very disrespectful way,” Shahin said after the incident last night.
Today, Shahin called for Muslims and non-Muslims to boycott US Airways unless the company changes its policy.
“They know what they have to do, they have to be fair and just with everybody,” he said.
The Washington, D.C., based lobby group Council on American-Islamic Relations planned to file a complaint, said CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper.
“Because, unfortunately, this is a growing problem of singling out Muslims or people perceived to be Muslims at airports, and it’s one that we’ve been addressing for some time,” Hooper said.
CAIR, however, has its own ties to Hamas, having been identified by two former FBI counter-terrorism chiefs as a spinoff of a front group for the Palestinian terrorist organization.
A Sept. 28, 2001, story in the Arizona Republic that said Arizona appears to have been the home of an al-Qaida sleeper cell, named Shahin as one of three part-time Arizona residents who “fits the pattern” of the terrorist group.
Shahin, identifed as being with the Tucson Islamic Center, said members of his mosque may have helped bin Laden in the early 1990s when the al-Qaida leader was fighting against the Russians.
The CIA at that time, Shahin said, called bin Laden a “freedom fighter.”
“Then they tell us he is involved in terrorist acts, and they stopped supporting him, and we stopped,” he said.
In the story, Shahin expressed doubt that Muslims were responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks and said he “didn’t trust much of what the FBI has divulged - including the hijackers’ identities.”
As for Al-Qaida nests in America, Shahin said, “All of these, they make it up.”
Witnesses to the imam’s explusion last night said some of them made anti-American comments about the war in Iraq before boarding the flight, according to Minneapolis airport spokesman Patrick Hogan.
Also, some of the men asked for seat belt extensions even though a flight attendant thought they didn’t need them.
“There were a number of things that gave the flight crew pause,” Hogan said.
Shahin claimed three members of the group prayed in the terminal before the six boarded the plane. Last night, however, he said they had prayed on the plane.
The imams boarded the plane individually, Shahin said, except for a blind member who needed assistance. They didn’t sit together and “did nothing,” he contended.
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An Arizona Spanish-language radio station is blasting a local police department for what it says is racial profiling: describing the suspect in a series of child rapes as “Hispanic.”
Police are offering $25,000 for any information leading to an arrest in the case of the “Chandler Rapist,” who began assaulting victims in Chandler, Ariz., in June 2006.
The suspect is described as Hispanic, 28 to 40 years old, short with a muscular build, dark hair and hazel or brown eyes.
Phoenix news talk radio station, KNUV 1190 AM, has complained to the police department about the description, claiming that “Hispanic” refers to an ethnicity, not a race.
“Hispanic could be white, it could be black, it could be dark-skinned complexion,” said Mayra Nieves, vice president of programming. “We Hispanics see it that way.”
Police won’t budge. They say they are following normal procedures for releasing information based on victims’ descriptions. Five victims between the ages of 12 and 14 have described their assailant as Hispanic.
The rapist usually strikes in the morning, when his victims’ parents, usually a single mother or father, leave for work. The rapist attacks when he knows the parent won’t be home, threatening his victims with a weapon before he sexually assaults them, said police spokesman Sgt. Rick Griner.
“We are not racially profiling anybody or anything,” said Griner. “For us to change or alter or omit, that is irresponsible on our part. The common goal is to catch this predator and get him off the street.”
Nieves said the current police description limits the station’s ability to give its listeners specifics about the suspect.
“We need specific descriptions because we are radio,” she said.
Nieves said using the term Hispanic is not only racial profiling, but also stereotyping.
The complaint from the radio station is the only the department received, Griner said.
“They are wanting a skin color. How do you classify a skin color?” Griner said. “What might be dark to me might not be dark to you. We’re going off what [the victims] are telling us.”
The American Civil Liberties Union said the the suspect’s description is not racial profiling. It said if police used race as the sole factor in describing the suspect, that could be racial profiling.
“They are using concrete information to follow up leads,” said Alessandra Soler Meetze, a spokeswoman for the ACLU Phoenix chapter.
An attack last Thursday, believed to be that of the same rapist, occurred when an intruder broke into a home and attacked a 15-year-old girl after her father went to work.
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By Jack Dunphy
Several months ago, before the American military surge in Iraq began to reap the benefits now plainly evident to all but the Left’s most willfully myopic, Rush Limbaugh predicted on his radio program that the Iraq war would not be a major factor in the 2008 presidential election. “Don’t doubt me,” he exhorts his listeners, but given the state of affairs in Iraq at that time, this struck me as wildly optimistic, even for Mr. Limbaugh. Count me among the humbly chastened. I should have known better.
So now, with even the New York Times all but forced to report on the improvements seen on the ground in Iraq, Democrats find themselves deprived of the issue they only recently hoped would carry them back to the White House next year. Instead they must now trot out more familiar, shall we say evergreen, grievances to rail and carry on about, such as health care (of which they will say there is too little), homelessness (too much), and our topic for today, racial profiling (appallingly commonplace).
Auditioning for a supporting role in the forthcoming discussion of racial profiling is Rep. Danny Davis, Democrat of Illinois. During the early morning hours of November 19, Rep. Davis was stopped and cited by Chicago police officers for driving to the left of the center of the roadway. Davis, whom few outside his district, and perhaps even within it, had ever heard of prior to the incident, went on a media blitz worthy of Al Sharpton himself to proclaim to the world that he had been wrongly treated, that he had been stopped by two white police officers for no other reason than for being black. “I hope that this was some kind of isolated instance,” Davis told CBS 2 in Chicago, “but I know in my heart of hearts, I know that it’s not.”
Of course he does.
To believe Rep. Davis’s accusation one must accept all of the following as fact: a) that the police officers who stopped him were able to discern, in the early morning darkness, that Davis and the other three occupants in the car were black, b) that the officers’ allegation that Davis’s car had crossed over the center line was simply made up out of whole cloth, and c) that even after becoming aware of Davis’s position (he had made a point of informing the officers of such), the officers elected to continue down the path of corruption and cite him on a fabricated charge, this despite the sure knowledge of the controversy that awaited them. Also, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of the West Side Chicago neighborhood where the stop took place is more than a third black, so even if the officers had known the race of the car’s occupants prior to making the stop, they hardly would have considered it anomalous.
I propose a simpler explanation: that Davis did in fact veer a bit over the center line, and that the officers suspected him, given the hour of the morning and the city’s reputation for revelry, of being under the influence of alcohol. After failing to detect any signs of impairment, but instead detecting abundant evidence of don’t-you-know-who-I-am haughtiness, they went ahead and wrote him up. And to the great credit of the Chicago Police Department, when Davis went to the station to register a complaint, he was advised to go to traffic court and tell it to the judge. Davis says he will do just that; his appearance is scheduled for December 28.
In making his claim of racial profiling, Davis is following a familiar and very often successful script. Victims, be they of racism, sexism, or any other brand of ism one can conjure up, are immune from the consequences of their behavior, whether it be a minor traffic violation or double murder, and indeed are even immune from criticism for it. Not long ago, here in Los Angeles, I was presented with a vivid example of a traffic violator who, like Rep. Davis, was attempting to cloak himself in the comforting and immunizing mantle of victimhood. I was one of several officers to respond to a traffic stop that had become, to understate the matter considerably, a bit heated. Remarkably, the driver admitted he had committed the violation he was accused of, but he nonetheless insisted he had been stopped because he was black. (You could stand on the sidewalk where the stop was made and, if you didn’t count the cops, wait for years for a white person to drive by.)
Writing in City Journal back in 2001, the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald eviscerated what she called the “anti-’racial-profiling’ juggernaut.” In an essay titled “The Myth of Racial Profiling,” Mac Donald wrote, “The anti-profiling crusade thrives on an ignorance of policing and a willful blindness to the demographics of crime.” Yet the myth stubbornly refuses to die, and indeed it thrives when it suits the purposes of such as Rep. Davis. Here in Los Angeles, for example, a member of the civilian police commission, despite having not a shred of supporting evidence, insists that racial profiling is endemic within the LAPD.
Commissioner John Mack, of whom I have written before, finds it disturbing that not a single one of the 850 racial-profiling complaints investigated by the LAPD between 2003 and 2006 was sustained. “I’m not suggesting that every allegation [of profiling] is a valid one,” Mack said in January 2007, “but I find it strange that we consistently never have a finding of one sustained complaint.” To my knowledge Mack has never bothered to go on even a single a ride-along with the officers he suspects of this pernicious behavior, but he hopes to expose it, at the cost of millions and millions of dollars, through the installation of video cameras in the LAPD’s patrol cars. Perhaps the cameras will be valuable, if only to prove to Mr. Mack just how wrong he is, but that money might be better spent to replace our aging hand-held radios, which make wonderful paperweights but are all too often otherwise worthless.
Yes, the racial-profiling discussion is with us still, and thanks to Rep. Davis we can expect to hear a lot more about it in the weeks and months ahead. Now, if we could only devise a way to identify cars driven by Democratic congressmen, then you’d really see some profiling.
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PARIS — The Paris police stop young Arab and black men for identity checks far more often than young whites, according to a study to be published Tuesday, lending factual substance to widespread accusations of racial profiling.
Racial and ethnic profiling by the police is illegal in France, but the study of more than 500 stops at major Parisian transit stations showed that those who appeared to be of Arab origin were stopped 7.8 times more often than whites, and that those perceived to be black, of sub-Saharan African or Caribbean origin, were stopped 6 times more often than whites.
The study, “Ethnic Profiling in Paris,” was carried out between November 2007 and May 2008 by the Open Society Justice Initiative, a program of the Soros Foundation, and the French National Center for Scientific Research. Trained monitors observed police making identity checks in and around the Gare du Nord and Châtelet-les Halles transit stations, then followed the person stopped to interview them out of the sight of the police.
The study also showed that the style of clothing worn by young people was an important indicator. Clothing associated with French youth culture — hip-hop, punk and Gothic styles — were also apparently markers for the police. Individuals in such clothing were only 10% of the population in the stations, the study said, but represented 47% of those stopped. The correlation with ethnicity was also very strong — two-thirds of those wearing such clothing were classified as minorities, which the study termed a “racialized variable.”
While the police were generally said to be correct or neutral in their interactions with those stopped, blacks and Arabs who were stopped were much more likely than whites to be frisked or detained.
Yazid Sabeg, 59, an Algerian-born businessman, was appointed by President Nicolas Sarkozy last December as the “commissioner for diversity and equal opportunity.” He was aware that the study was taking place, he said in an interview, and the results did not particularly surprise him. “Profiling? It exists,” he said. “It’s been an issue for a long time.”
But there has never before been real data supporting what he called “the sense of injustice” among minority youth, both Arab and black, that they are being singled out on the basis of their skin color. “The police have a hard job, but they have to make more efforts not to give the feeling that they are discriminating among populations — this is the major problem.”
This sense of injustice “leads to tension among the youth and tension between the youth and the police,” he said. “Social injustice and inequality of treatment produce aggression” of the kind that led to the 2005 riots in the suburbs of Paris and 300 other cities and towns, which ended with some 4,000 people arrested, thousands of vehicles destroyed and more than 125 police officers wounded.
The Paris police said that the authors of the study had consulted them. “The criticism we received seems important to me, with lessons we will try to extract,” said Marie Lajus, a spokeswoman for the police. She noted that while the study shows that the police do not stop a representative sample of the population, “our police checks take place in areas where criminality is high.”
Some checks are authorized by the public prosecutor and so do not need to be justified, especially in the Gare du Nord, while police in transport stations are looking for armed troublemakers and gang members, Ms. Lajus said. “Police try to be efficient and stop people they think could be linked to this risk,” she said. “We do it with police intuition, based on our experience” with youth gangs “who come in groups on trains from the suburbs” in order “to pick fights,” she said.
The police are supposed to be looking for suspicious behavior, but they are also looking for illegal immigrants.
Still, racial profiling of any kind is prohibited by law and by the police’s own Code of Moral Conduct, said Nathalie Duhamel, general secretary of the National Commission on Security Ethics, which investigates complaints against the police. But identity checks and controls “leave no paper trails, so there is no way to monitor what happens,” she said. “Some people complain to us about being searched multiple times. It can become a form of harassment. But it’s impossible for us to investigate since there are no traces.” Similarly, she said, “Officially we have no ethnic statistics” and the state rejects ethnic identity in the public sphere, “but in practice, it’s there.”
In the Gare du Nord, Christopher Mendes, 21, was waiting for a suburban train home after work as a network tester for SFR, a French telephone company. He is black, with short hair, and that day wore a green polo shirt and baggy beige shorts. He was quietly angry as he described being stopped and searched by the police, sometimes twice in the same day.
“Of course we’re being screened because of our color,” he said. “We see it every day. When it’s not me, it’s a friend. When it’s not a friend, it’s another black guy. It’s infuriating when you’ve done nothing, because even if they search you and find nothing, the attitude won’t be, ‘OK, you’re clear,’ but more, ‘We didn’t get you this time.’ “
The police refuse to explain why he is stopped, he said. “They’re not looking for a behavior but for a type,” Mr. Mendes said. “It doesn’t help the atmosphere between us and the cops, that the peaceful people are treated like thugs.”
Still, the situation in the banlieues is much worse, he said. “The controls, the insults. And the kids are much worse there, too. Most controls end up with insults and shouting from both sides.”
Mr. Sabeg said that the answer lies in better police training and recruitment. “We need more young policemen and a police that better represents young people from the suburbs,” he said. “It’s also a problem of training and supervision, especially for those who work under very hard conditions.”
He supports the laws and codes that prohibit profiling, he said. “But they don’t work.”
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Jonathan Kay
Here at the Halifax International Security Forum, we just finished the panel on “Protecting the Public: Job #1.” Panelists were former Israeli PM Ehud Barak, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones, Minister of State for Security, Home Office, UK. Interesting discussion by all participants, but Barak stole the show with two comments, both related to protecting airliners from hijack and destruction:
1. Following on John Manley’s earlier anecdote about just having watched an 80-year-old grandmother being singled out for a head-to-toe search at a Denver airport, Barak explained the Israeli approach: “[Israelis] profile people. We are making [distinctions] very quickly between 80% of individuals who are out of the question [as security threats]; 15% who probably have a certain relevance but are very far-fetched; and a very small [5%] fraction that has to be dealt with [by security personnel] in a more [extensive] way.”
2. “Forty-five years ago, the first Israeli aircraft was hijacked to Algiers. [We asked ourselves] ‘What should be done about [hijacking]?’ It became clear that the only way [was to prevent] the attackers from getting to the cockpit. So we established a system of two doors [on El Al aircraft]. You have to open one only after you talk to the pilot. After you enter, the previous one is closed, and then the captain can look at you through an eyehole and decide whether to let you in [the second door], leave you there, or he could shoot you in the head. The cost at the time [for this system] was $12,000 — probably 1/10,000th the cost of the airplane. Now think what could have happened to world terror if this practice would have been adapted by all airliners as a simple answer. Even 9/11 could not have happened.”
I like the idea of a pilot being able to shoot a hijacker “in the head” as he stands helplessly in an airplane-cockpit airlock. But that situation would come to pass rarely in the post-9/11 age, when terrorists prefer simply to blow themselves up rather than seize a plane’s controls. Even more useful is the 80-15-5 rule, which I would urge Canada and other Western nations to adopt as soon as possible.
p.s. I’ll be interested to hear the commenters describe what sort of specimens they think should be lumped into the 15% and 5% categories. But please try to avoid hate speech in doing so.
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