Cops in the U.S. and Britain continue to target blacks, Latinos and Middle Eastern types as potential criminals or terrorists. A few have already ended up as dead as Jean Charles de Menezes, who ironically in his home country of Brazil would have been considered a white man. In view of the scandal, Kim Zetter thinks that in view of the de Menezes case, it’s high time law enforcement started looking not at dark skin but strange behavior. This isn’t anything new. Too bad the idea that racial profiling doesn’t work comes too late for de Menezes, who may have been brutally iced in the London Underground not by the London cops, but by UK special forces. Seems these guys have got 007’s old directive: a license to kill.
Says Zetter:
[…] In 1986, Murphy was a 32-year-old hotel chambermaid from Dublin, Ireland, who was six months pregnant and on her way to marry her fiancé in Israel. Authorities discovered a bomb in her carry-on bag as she boarded a plane in London on her way to Tel Aviv.
Kozo Okamoto didn’t fit the profile of a terrorist, either. In 1972, he and two other Japanese passengers had just arrived in Tel Aviv on a flight from Puerto Rico when they retrieved guns from their checked bags and opened fire in the arrival terminal at Ben Gurion International Airport, killing more than two dozen people and injuring nearly 80.
Zetter cites how Israel was stymied in its efforts to nab terrorists before they blew up a jetliner or a bus, until they finally changed tactics. Why? Because their security forces had to accept the idea that the threat could come from white or light-skinned people, and not the traditional profile of dark-skinned, Arabic-speaking people–the Palestinians. Zetter goes on to name “Timothy McVeigh (the Oklahoma City bomber), Eric Rudolph (the abortion clinic bomber), and Richard Reid (the ponytailed British-Jamaican who tried to bring down an American Airlines jet with his shoe)” and the notorious Saudis who crashed the jetliners into the World Trade Center to show the diversity of the terrorist threat, foreign and domestic.
In the same article, David Harris, professor of law and values at the University of Toledo College of Law in Ohio, and author of the new book, “Profiles in Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work,” says:
[F]ocusing on specific ethnic groups alienates the very people authorities need to help them catch terrorists. “By the time the threat is at the subway or airport, we’re down to the last line of defense,” Harris says. “You really want to catch these people before they go to the subway.”
Most of all, he believes, law enforcement needs to gain the confidence and cooperation from residents who might live near a sleeper cell, and who may have noticed new neighbors, inordinate activity, and who seem to be flush with money but are unemployed.
Furthermore, Harris insists that when police continue to use race or ethnicity as a tool, their accuracy in catching the right culprit(s) decreases, thus heightening the possibility of mistaken identity and accidental, or as it has been darkly posed in the case of de Menezes, revenge deaths. As an example, Harris cited the ‘stop and frisk’ program during the Guiliani era that was instigated to reduce street crime. Understandably, tensions rose in the black and Latino neighborhoods where the program was implemented, because residents believed that they were being targeted, not crime. Said Harris:
“They’re focusing on appearance when they should be focusing on behavior,” he says. “When they’re not distracted by race, they’re actually doing a more accurate job” of picking out the right people.
Focusing on appearance produces a lot of false positives. And “every time you introduce a false positive, you take resources away from your ability to focus on people who are really of interest — those who are behaving suspiciously,” Harris says. “If it’s a question of finding a needle in a haystack … don’t put more hay on the top.”
What does work in preventing terrorism, Harris says, is behavior profiling. “If you’re going to catch people who mean to put bombs on your subway trains or in airplanes, you don’t actually care [if they’re] young Muslim men … You care about [keeping] anyone from boarding the airplane who is going to behave like a terrorist.”
As I said earlier, this is nothing new. American blacks have complained about this treatment for decades, and yet law enforcement resists changing and persists in pursuing the profile, even as others–whites–are actually perpetrating the crime. To this very hour, it still doesn’t matter whether people of color are being trailed in a department store, being stopped while driving their own Lexus or Escalade or being at the wrong place at the wrong time as Jean de Menezes (or Amadou Diallo) was. People of color will continue bear the brunt of suspicion and rage until people finally decide that the cost of killing an innocent in pursuit of the guilty is altogether too expensive.
