PROFILES ENCOURAGED
It Isn't Easy Being Screened
Those who protect our safety must rely in part on stereotypes.
These days, it seems every evening's news leads with another story of consternation by somebody over the use of "racial profiling." But before the country is carried away with slogans, we ought to spend a little time being honest about the question. That means recognizing that most profiling is not racial, that some profiling (even when it involves race) is essential under some circumstances, and that it would be impossible for law enforcement to do its job without taking into account the observable features of people.
Young men are vastly more likely to commit crimes than are young women or older men. When the police scan the streets looking for people to question, should they stop men and women, old and young at equal rates? Black men are six to eight times more likely to commit violent crimes than are white men. When the police patrol the streets trying to prevent crime, should they stop white and black men at the same rate?
Notice, please, that we say "stop," not "arrest." The police have a right to question citizens, but they have a right to arrest them only if they have evidence they have committed a crime. It would be manifestly wrong to arrest or issue so much as a traffic ticket to a person simply because of his age, sex, or race. "Driving while black" (or while young or male) is not an offense with which anyone should be charged.
We do not doubt that pedestrians or motorists have been stopped because of their race, but we suspect that if someone did a decent study of police behavior (instead of relying on the complaints of politicians and activists) they would discover that in most cases (if unhappily, not in all of them), there were more cues leading to the stop than just sex or race.
Consider the case of the Street Crimes Unit in the New York Police Department. This group, while much maligned, took thousands of guns off the street, helping drive down that city's murder rate. It did so by stopping and patting down people on the street. Heather Mac Donald reported that the unit frisked 45,000 people during a two-year period, leading to 9,500 arrests and the seizure of 2,500 illegal guns.
Getting one gun off the street for every 18 stops is a pretty good outcome, considering that those not carrying guns, or doing something otherwise illegal, were merely inconvenienced for a few minutes. No doubt some people regarded the stop as worse than an inconvenience and no doubt some stops may have been hard to justify. But the hassle factor has to be evaluated in the light of the great gains: 2,500 fewer dangerous weapons in dangerous hands.
Now, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, the task of law enforcement has been taken to a different level. It must figure out how to prevent a tiny fraction of the millions of people who use our airports from carrying knives, guns and bombs onto airliners. For people working airport security stations, the risks to society of their failure are vastly greater than for the Street Crimes Unit.
In just a few seconds, a screener must decide whether to pat down a person who is hurrying to a plane. Trained properly, these screeners must be able to notice some bits of behavior or body language that may be a tip-off--a nervous, hurried manner, perhaps, or dodgy eyes or a guilty look. But not all terrorists are basket cases. And for many of those serving as the country's final line of defense against terrorism in the skies, physical features may be all they have to go on. As Peter Schuck of Yale Law School recently pointed out, the screeners have no choice but to rely on stereotypes to make a reasonable judgment.
So, stereotypes. The word has come to connote any irrational prejudice. But stereotypes are not in fact any different from the fleeting impressions and judgments we all use to govern our daily lives. We are cautious about people who have a rough appearance or speak in an erratic manner just as we are drawn to people who are attractive and well-spoken. And while those instincts of avoidance or attraction are not always reliable, indulging ourselves with the luxury of waiting for conclusive evidence would mean either meeting no one, or everyone.
As Mr. Schuck says, a stereotype is halfway between an error and a fact. We should try to use it cautiously.
When James Wilson's wife, Roberta, recently went flying, she was picked out at the boarding gate by American Airlines for a complete search. She is the least threatening person one could image--five feet tall, blond hair, older than she would like to be, and with a beatific expression on her face. She was picked, the airline agent said, "at random."
When Heather Higgins went to Reagan National Airport, Delta Airlines selected 15 passengers for complete searches. Though all terrorists involved in Sept. 11 were young Middle Eastern males, Delta picked three elderly men (one an Asian), six Caucasian women, including one with two children, and two Hispanic women. Yet in the line of 70 or so passengers, there were six individuals who were not only Middle Eastern but young, male and traveling alone. Not one of them was checked. When asked, Delta said the only searches they would do were at random.
By contrast, when a male Secret Service agent armed with a gun left on his airplane seat his bag and some books, apparently written in Arabic, the flight attendants became alarmed. The pilot reviewed the man's paperwork and found it incomplete. When asked to fill out a new form, the agent became anxious and then hostile. As Christopher Caldwell has pointed out in The Weekly Standard, had the agent been named John Smith instead of Walied Shater, there would have been no incident. But Mr. Shater and the Council on American Islamic Relations claimed he was the victim of ethnic profiling.
Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Higgins get searched, and they pass it off. But a Near Eastern male carrying a gun and claiming he was going to see the president on the basis of incomplete forms starts complaining about profiling?
This is nonsense. Doing only random searches and not questioning an armed Middle Eastern male can only be justified if your only goal is to avoid the charge of "profiling." If your goal instead is to prevent somebody from carrying a shoe bomb or box cutters onto an airplane, then the search should not be random but deliberate, using all available facts to form a useful, if not entirely reliable, stereotype.
Of course, to do that exposes the airline to charges of "profiling." And indeed it is profiling. But it is not a profile based exclusively or even chiefly on race, but on hints--that is, useful stereotypes--supplied by judgments made by rational people. Unfortunately, political leaders and civil rights activists have so polarized the discussion of profiling that an entirely defensible screening policy is now regarded as a threat to our fundamental liberties and is replaced by an irrational screening policy that threatens our safety.
The more we study terrorists, the more we will learn about them and the better our screening profiles--our stereotypes--will become. If we apply that knowledge, fewer innocent people will face any burden and more real terrorists will be caught. We will overcome slogans about "racial profiling" and instead become a bit safer.
Mr. Wilson is author of "Moral Judgment" (Basic Books, 1997). Mrs. Higgins is vice president of the Independent Womens Forum.
