Daniel Pipes: A Call for Intelligent Profiling

The New York Sun ^ | December 30, 2003 | Daniel Pipes

[quidnunc]

In mid-November, Yusuf Suleman Motala, a Muslim leader in the United Kingdom said to be highly regarded and have a vast following, was at Heathrow Airport on his way to the lesser pilgrimage in Mecca. But British officers stopped him and Mr. Motala reports they asked him questions about the Islamic religion, the instruction at schools under his guidance, and his association with "jihadi groups." The resulting delay caused him to cancel his pilgrimage.

The Muslim Council of Britain responded with "outrage and shock" and demanded that such "profiling of Muslims " not recur.

Is this demand reasonable? What, in an effort to ferret out the enemy, is the proper place of profiling? For that matter, what is profiling?

In a just-published book titled Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes (Harvard University Press), Frederick Schauer, Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard, offers a thoughtful analysis of these questions. Mr. Schauer starts by offering terminology to discuss this subject.

• A generalization is the process by which, "on the basis of a characteristic of some members of a class, we reach conclusions or make decisions about the entire class."

• Spurious factors are those with no statistical import in reaching generalizations (i.e., the role of gender in predicting intelligence); nonspurious factors do have statistical importance (i.e., gender in predicting physical strength).

• Prejudices are views based on spurious beliefs about a group.

• Profiling is "a process of generalization, seeking to narrow the list of possible suspects by identifying an area of interaction among numerous generalizations."

-snip-

[goldstategop]

Profiling is an attempt to identify suspects based on a set of rational criteria and past behavior patterns. All of which help us to predict what certain people are going to and not going to do. But its verboten to the PC Thought Police, which holds every one is the same and no discrimination is allowable - a corollary doctrine insists singling out specific groups of people is bad per se. And this is why we have idiotic screening policies in place at our airports based on the irrational presumption every one is a likely terrorist suspect even though the data and real life experience tell us otherwise. The first thing to fly out of the window with PC profiling is common sense followed by a operant denial of the real source of terrorist threats. All because we're paralyzed by our democratic fear of discriminating against any one, that we won't move to discriminate for a sound reason - to save innocent lives.

[Valin]

"The origins of profiling lie in the early 1950s, when the New York City police, hoping to identify the perpetrator who had set off more than 30 bombs, turned to a psychiatrist named James Brussel for help."


Profiling goes back looong before that to the first cops. It's what cops do, (that guy don't look right...something wrong about them...)
I was a Security Policeman in the AF and profiling is what we did most of the time.

[Tailgunner Joe]

bttt