Address profiling openly, Moose urges (This is rich!)

Speaking in York, Charles Moose told police and others how his department approached the issue.

Charles Moose, former Montgomery County, Md., police chief, said police should openly address inquiries about racial profiling.

Much of the battleground that community residents and police were on regarding racial profiling and whether it exists may have been skipped over Wednesday night when a nationally recognized police officer spoke to a small crowd at Crispus Attucks Community Center. Though many of the county's movers and shakers — including lawmakers, commissioners and city council members — weren't in attendance, the conversation among county residents and York County police department leaders addressed racial profiling in a way that has the York County Coalition Against Racial Profiling feeling optimistic.

Charles Moose, who, as police chief in Montgomery County, Md., headed the task force that investigated the Washington-area sniper attacks in 2002, spoke openly about the issue, leaving little room for questioning.

"Racial profiling does happen; it is real," Moose told the group of about 50 people, which included police chiefs from the Northeastern Regional, York City, Spring Garden and York Area Regional departments and York County District Attorney Stan Rebert.

Moose has been speaking around the country on police-related topics as he works temporarily for the American Civil Liberties Union.

The answer, he said, is for police to listen and abide by what the community asks for to solve the problem. If residents ask for data collection, don't resist them, Moose said. He explained how Montgomery County collected data, which proved officers weren't profiling.

In the last two months, the York County Coalition Against Racism has asked local police to collect racial data on all traffic stops and to create a police review board. Some police officers have said data collection isn't possible; others have said it's not effective.

The coalition was formed this year in response to a racial profiling lawsuit filed with the help of the ACLU on behalf of a black Springettsbury Township man — who is a state trooper — against the York County Sheriff's Office. Raphael Christopher believes his constitutional rights were violated when two deputies stopped him for going too fast for wet road conditions on East Market Street in York last August. York County Sheriff Bill Hose and two deputies, Frederick Nestlerode and Matthew Kerr, were named in the suit.

Hose later said that racial profiling doesn't exist and that he's tired of hearing about it. His comments led the York chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to call for his resignation.

Hose, who was invited to Wednesday's meeting but didn't attend, has declined comment on the issue in recent weeks. His son, Scott Hose, a York City Police officer and Fraternal Order of Police officer, was also invited to the meeting and didn't attend.

York County FOP Lodge No. 73, the police union that represents all county police departments, including the sheriff's office, stated in a news release in late May that union members "strongly support Sheriff Hose's views and believe that his past practices have demonstrated his professionalism."

Lodge President Ken Witmer said in May that profiling does not exist in York County.

On Wednesday, however, Witmer told the group he believes racial profiling does happen, though he hasn't seen it.

After the meeting, Phyllis Calhoun of York said she appreciated how Moose spoke openly and directly to the residents and said she hopes everyone will get together to solve the problem and better the community.

Paula Knudsen, a staff attorney for the ACLU who helped form the racial profiling coalition, said she believes the discussion about racial profiling advanced greatly Wednesday night.

"It's important for law enforcement to hear a nationally recognized law enforcement official say that data collection is challenging, but they did it anyway," she said.

Ugh! Yet another go round on this false issue of ‘Racial Profiling’…

There is no such thing. It would be pointless and idiotic to ‘profile’ race. Race is assumed one of the most directly observable characteristics of a human – and generally, there would be no reason to construct a profile to predict or classify race. While it is true that some misclassification is present in the everyday typing of race by visible characteristics – for the most part no one needs to use a scorecard or profile to make a pretty good guess at race.

A profile is a tool, a template, against which to compare individuals and assess the probability that they are involved in something you want to scrutinize and interdict (drug smuggling, terrorism, etc.). It is not a perfect predictor – just an efficient screening device. To be minimally efficient it needs to be only slightly better than random chance assignment. A good system needs to be much better than random chance – not only because of the extraordinary levels of damage that a terrorist can accomplish – leveraged by nuclear, radiological or biological technologies – but also because 99.9+% of those screened are not terrorists and to burden them unduly lays a very heavy cost in terms of inefficiency on the vast majority of the traveling public.

Before 9/11/2001 there was a need to screen air travelers and border crossers for drug courier activity. Hence, there were ‘drug courier profiles’ – models that aimed to sort out the mass of air travelers or border crosses and rank them on the probability that they were drug couriers. These models were based on actual experience of persons stopped in airports or at border crossing stations. You build a model with multiple variables (origin-destination pair, elapsed trip time, time at destination, method of payment, country of origin, number of days in advance of flight payment is made, etc.) which, taken together, for a predictive score than can be used to segment high probability (…of being a drug courier) from low probability.

The entire purpose of profiling is to focus limited police, border patrol, DEA or FBI (and now DHS and TSA) resources on those who are most likely to be drug couriers (or terrorists, or illegal aliens, etc.)

The use of the term ‘racial profiling’ has been an attempt by Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, et. al. to make an issue out of something that does not exist. It is really a very silly thing to assert that such a thing exists or is a serious issue. To allow the continual trafficking of such a false label in the major media without challenge is shameless.

If police were arbitrarily stopping individuals simply because they are black – they are not using a profile. And if they are using a properly constructed profile – they may be stopping black people – but not simply because they are black. Rather it would be because other characteristics of their air travel, or their situation at the time of a border crossing, or their manner of travel were highly correlated with drug courier behavior.

Building a screening model for air terrorism will be difficult. The 19 who did commit terrorist acts on 9/11/2001 were cast against a background of perhaps millions who were to fly that day who did not. The sparseness of the data makes building a statistical model difficult. Other techniques – such as neural networking can be used to mine data – but there again, the number of instances of actual terrorists observed to contribute data for model development is very small. Terrorists of the Al Qaeda variety have developed organizational cells and methods (cash exchange by hand) which minimize the transactional trail which can be monitored.

In lieu of statistically or neural network derived models – judgmental models will have to do. A rational development of a judgmental model is accomplished by taking the common characteristics of known terrorists and generalizing them as characteristics in a model or scorecard to screen people for likely terrorists.

Other efforts to screen terrorists will come from analysis of patterns in credit card usage and perhaps even cell phone usage or even electric power consumption. Patterns in large datasets can be examined to find the particular elements that isolate a high concentration of likely terrorists.

The ignorant reflex against profiling is just that - but if we are stupid enough to listen to those who reject profiling as a concept - we are in danger.

There definitely needs to be some common sense applied to this issue. For instance, it's just unconscionable not to say that a wanted man is black if witnesses say he was black, because that immediately eliminates 90% of the population as suspects.

Somewhat more difficult, there are racial or ethnic groups who are inordinately involved in certain kinds of crimes. The Italians used to be big in many fields. Blacks do most of the crack trade in many areas, and so on.

In the case of the beltway snipers, Moose failed mainly because he DID profile, but with no basis on the facts of the case, settling on the theory that it was white fundamentalists. Given the racial mixture of the victims that is a pretty silly theory in itself. Given the worry about terrorism, it might have made more sense to profile for terrorists. But if he had just checked his computers, he would have noticed that the people who were eventually caught, no thanks to him, had gone through at least TEN police road blocks set up after the shootings. How many people did that?

I'm guessing you all are expert searchers here at FR. I'm not having much luck finding the original threads from 10/02, using "Beltway Snipers" are the keywords. It seems to want 3 keywords, or gives only a few URLs to visit.

There are a few entries, which give me some info for a Let-Ed rebuttal of Moose, but how do I find the original threads? Can anyone give me some tips on searching for facts of when he started profiling for whites in a white van, how many people were murdered before and after that point?

I'm not asking for you to do it for me; just give me some of your wisdom and experience and tips. I tried the archives, but plain old "Beltway Snipers" isn't working too well.

Back in the fall of '02, I "accidentally" found FRs link and remember reading some very, very long sniper threads.

I found that if he'd checked his computers, the blue chevy sniper car had been logged through 10 roadblocks, and he and his men made no connection with the two occupants because they were profiling for the white fundamentalist/white van scenario.

Try this search string. Also, many of the threads will be cross-linked. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/search?s=sniper&ok=Search&q=deep&m=any&o=score&SX=40e435f66b0c1fba4eced84988dd0f77f5df75ed the blue chevy sniper car had been logged through 10 roadblocks

Not just gone through roadblocks. They were found sleeping in the car on more than one occasion and let go. Also, I recall the newspaper report from the first night of shootings stated that a dark red or blue Chevy Caprice was seen in the area by witnesses. That was the last mention of the dark Caprice until the Home Depot shooting in Falls Church where a witness saw two dark-skinned men in an older dark-colored sedan. That was also one of the times they were let through the roadblocks. He said they looked right at him and it gave him shivers. Then the next time we heard about the dark Caprice was when they were captured.

Moose was hand-picked by Hillary and Janet Reno, originally to be Chief of the DC police and when DC rejected hime Hillary and Reno pushed for him to get the Montgomery Cty. job. The whole reason he was picked was due to his focus on racial profiling.

He sees the whole world through race and IMO it had a significant impact on the way the sniper investigation was conducted. Unfortunately he and the FBI profilers were reinforcing each others predispositions. Many police officers and citizens were put at greater risk because of this myopic view that only whites could be the snipers.

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