VIDEO DEBATE: Airports Should Use Racial And Religious Profiling (49 percent says YES)

A group of six experts recently took on the subject of profiling at an Intelligence Squared U.S. event. It was three against three in an Oxford-style debate on the motion “U.S. Airports Should Use Racial And Religious Profiling". Before the debate, the audience voted 37 percent in favor of the motion and 33 percent against, with 30 percent undecided. Afterward, the group arguing for the motion had shifted the most minds — 49 percent of the audience said that “U.S. Airports Should Use Racial And Religious Profiling,” while 40 percent were against. Eleven percent remained undecided.

Actually, they should use behavioral profiling and background checks. Of course, part of the background information that should lead to more scrutiny includes adherence to Islam and prior travel to any regions known to or suspected of harboring Muslim terrorists.

Racial profiling is utterly useless—the panty bomber was an Hausa, not an Arab, and the shoe bomber was an Englishman. Next we’re likely to see a Bosniak (racially identical to a Serb or Croat) or a Chechen (quick can you tell the “racial” difference between a Muslim Chechen and an Orthodox Christian South Osetian?) or maybe a Moro Islander (Can you see any racial difference between him and this Christian Filipino from the island just to the north? Didn’t think so.)

Our society allows police to subject individuals even to abusive intrusions when such actions are deemed reasonable responses to actions. They stop a speeding car. They search with reasonable suspicion based on specific and demonstrable facts. They subdue and even kill a citizen in response to escalating levels of violence.

However, TSA bureaucrats are allowed intimate, primal domination of people when they have done nothing to elicit the behavior. The massive, random and warrantless program of body scanners and pat downs creates an environment for institutionalizing the worst demons of the human condition.

This country has before and should not again, suffer the consequences of allowing one group of people dominion over another, when submission was not provoked by the other party’s uncivil behavior. In The Life and Times of Fredrick Douglas, he believed that slavery perpetrated as much emotional and psychological damage on the owner as the slave.

The current TSA approach reminds me of the futile and tragic consequences of gun control legislation, which focuses on the instruments of violence, and ignores the person using the instruments. For just one example consider that in Fairfax County, Virginia guns appear to live passive lives, but as soon as they cross the Potomac River and enter the Anacostia area of Washington D.C. they become psychopaths when under the influence of rigid gun control legislation.

Such seems to be the befuddled focus of TSA procedures, which exclusively look for things. Do procedures ignoring people really make us any safer? Is the impact counterproductive like gun control? Maybe they are merely the only alternatives remaining after everything faces the politically correct gate keepers, who judge everything according to their personal moral orthodoxy?

The Homeland Security approach contrasts sharply to the disparaged NSA program for warrantless intrusion into private communications, where analysts sought a handful of useful leads from the 60 to 100 billion calls per day. Their standards first passed a Fourth Amendment test, and then focused on much narrower parameters to find signals of interest.

For the NSA probability and statistics enabled approaches, which are otherwise condemned as profiling. TSA should be allowed enhanced surveillance methods, when their rules focus on a body of behaviors and characteristics, even racial, denoting responses with a higher probability for terrorist actions.

However, a powerful resting inertia must be overcome; such as already dominates the gun control debate. Here abiding faith and political power combine to leave people’s behavior and characteristics out of the equation.

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