Profiling may not be good for screening
Reader comment on item: A Call for Intelligent Profiling[ by Frederick Schauer]

Submitted by Ronald Fox (United States), Jan 2, 2004 at 17:11

Profiling may be good for catching perpetrators, but it is obviously of limited value in preventing preplanned acts of terrorism.

Profiling can be a positive danger. Imagine this scenario. Airport screeners use Middle Eastern extraction as a prime factor. Terrorists are aware of this, and also wish to target a flight. The most logical course for them is to send a non-Middle Eastern terrorist (of which there will be more in the future), and to send several middle-Eastern decoys along on the same flight. The inspectors will busily turn their resources to search the Middle Easterners, and the active terrorist will have a lower-than-chance probability of being caught.

Terrorists can profile as well as police. It would be a tremendous disadvantage to depend primarily on racial profiling on flight screening. I don't disagree on principle with the use of profiling, but it would be very dangerous if it made us drop our guard.

---

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened for relevance, substance, and tone, and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome, but comments are rejected if scurrilous, off-topic, vulgar, ad hominem, or otherwise viewed as inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the Guidelines for Comments. For informational purposes, we identify countries from which comments are sent.