Source:  Midstream, Feb-March 2002 v48 i2 p11(2). [Midstream is a Jewish-American issues magazine]
 
    Title:  Common sense in profiling.
   Author:  Bruce J. Terris
 

A few days after September 11th, passengers or pilots on several flights refused to fly when they saw several Arabs about to board the planes. They were roundly condemned by officialdom and the press. But they were right. They were using common sense. They were simply doing basic "profiling," determining that future terrorist actions were also likely to be carried out by Arab males.

I am not going to discuss court decisions that have considered the profiling of minorities. I am not doing so because I have faith in American courts interpreting the Constitution consistent with common sense. And, as I will discuss, common sense demands the use of profiling if the United States is going to have any chance to prevent or at least reduce the number of terrorist atrocities in the future.

The police use profiling as a matter of course. Let me give an example. If eyewitnesses describe bank robbers as being Arabs, the police will, of course, in looking for the criminals, naturally concentrate their attention on Arabs. However, since the eyewitnesses may be wrong, competent policemen will not devote all their resources to investigating Arabs. But they will proportionally stop far more Arabs at roadblocks than non-Arabs, look for likely criminals in the Arab community, and describe the likely criminals as Arabs to the media so that the public can be alerted to help find them.

I assume that no one would object to this profiling, since it is based on concrete evidence that the bank robbers were probably Arabs. However, the evidence is just as strong that future terrorist attacks are likely to be committed by Arabs. All nineteen of the hijackers who crashed the four planes on September 11th were Arabs. The suspects who have since been picked up by the FBI are entirely or at least mostly Arabs. The terrorist attacks against Americans, which cost hundreds of lives during the last decade in Lebanon,
Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Yemen, have all been carried out by Arabs. The Arab terrorist organization run by bin Laden has openly stated that it intends to continue with its terrorism against the United States. One has to be politically correct to the point of blindness not to believe that future attacks are likely be carried out by Arabs.

This, of course, does not mean that other sources should be ignored. It is possible that Arabs will recruit non-Arabs to do their dirty work, that non-arab terrorist organizations in places like Spain and South America will be encouraged by the events of September 11th to commit terrorism in the United States, or that home-grown ideologues like Timothy McVeigh or crackpots will engage in terrorism. But these possibilities are far less likely or are at least far less likely to have the incredible results of September 11th.

The experience of Israel in combating terrorism shows what needs to be done in this country. Israel has been the number one target of Arab terrorists for decades, but no Israeli plane has ever been hijacked, and no other terrorist acts have ever resulted in anything close to the loss of life that occurred on September 11th. The reason customarily given for this success is the tight security in Ben Gurion Airport.

I have flown out of Ben Gurion more than 150 times in the last 20 years. The Israeli success does not come from using scanners or asking the usual questions -- did you pack this bag yourself, and has it been under your control since you packed it? Instead, the heart of the Israeli system is that they profile. They concentrate their attention on the people that they believe are likely to be most dangerous.

The Israelis use intelligent and well-trained security to question all passengers, not sales representatives who handle check-in at airline counters. Based on profiling, some passengers are questioned for only a couple of minutes. Others, who appear more suspicious, may be questioned for 15 to 30 minutes. A few have their hand- and checked-luggage searched from top to bottom.

The Israeli criteria for profiling have not, for obvious reasons, been published. But it is obvious, from my watching the proceedings in Ben Gurion so many times, that Israelis other than Arabs are questioned for only a couple of minutes, and their luggage is rarely checked. A small number of Americans and Europeans, who satisfy some criteria for suspicion, are questioned longer, and a very few have their hand-luggage searched. In contrast, virtually all Arabs are thoroughly questioned and their luggage carefully gone through.

Several times, The Washington Post has reported that the United States could never adopt the Israeli approach, because passengers in Israel are delayed for 45 minutes or more going through security and the delay would be worse in the busy airports of the United States. However, it has never taken me more than 10 minutes to go through security at Ben Gurion, including the time waiting to be questioned. I have seen very few other passengers waiting for longer than 10 or 15 minutes. The few exceptions are passengers who fall within the suspect categories. The process takes so little time, because the Israelis have enough security personnel to handle the number of passengers boarding the
particular plane and the operation is efficiently organized. There is no reason why the United States cannot run just as efficient and effective operations if it chooses to do so.

In comparison, not long ago I took a flight from Reagan National Airport to Newark to Tel Aviv. On the domestic flight to Newark, my checked-luggage was run through a scanner, but only because I was flying to Israel. The checked-luggage of none of the other passengers was scanned. Hand-luggage belonging to only two of the approximately 50 passengers was examined by security personnel. The choice was made arbitrarily, by computer. As it happened, I was chosen. So after 150 flights to and from Israel and the United States, my hand-luggage was finally searched, not at Ben Gurion but in
Washington, D.C. I would have had no objection, except that I know that such arbitrary decision-making is totally ineffective to guard against terrorists.

In contrast, before the flight from Newark to Tel Aviv, the hand-luggage of every passenger was carefully checked, and a wand and pat-down were used on the person of every passenger. This took almost an hour. This system is admirably effective. However, this is not done on domestic flights, like the ones that were used to crash planes into the World Trade Center, and it is probably not going to continue, even for most international flights, in view of the cost and delay.

Existing luggage scanners, even the new improved varieties, cannot detect every weapon, every explosive material, and every other dangerous object. Yet, it is obvious that American airports are not going to search carefully the luggage and person of every passenger. If every piece of luggage and every passenger were carefully searched, the cost would be astronomical and the delay prohibitive. The only alternatives are to check nobody, to check a few passengers arbitrarily, or to attempt to choose rationally the passengers who present the greatest danger.

In light of the events of September 11th, we can obviously not afford to check nobody. If we check passengers arbitrarily, we will waste precious resources checking blacks, Hispanics, and Norwegians, even though experience tells us that they are extremely unlikely to be hijackers. We will check 80-year-old women and 8-year-old children. It would be pure luck if we happened to check the actual terrorists. On the other hand, if experts establish rational profiling criteria, we can concentrate our efforts on the categories of passengers likely to be dangerous.

The issue of profiling does not apply only to airplane flights. Terrorism experts warn that future terrorist attacks may involve trucks loaded with explosives, as in the attacks in Kenya and Tanzania. As a result, for one day, the police checked every truck going through the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel. When massive traffic jams developed, the effort was abandoned. Now, only spot checks are being made. But profiling is not being done to concentrate on the truck drivers likely to pose the greatest danger. Similarly, vehicles crossing the border from Canada are either being checked carefully, causing massive
lines, or are not being checked at all. It is argued that no government actions in the United States should be based on ethnicity, or race, or religion. However, as the bank robbery example set forth above shows, law enforcement agencies regularly profile in order to solve crimes, even though they may not use this term. The terrorist danger now
facing the United States is far more serious than any bank robbery or other criminal acts against which profiling is now being used.

No doubt, profiling can be abused. It can be used for crimes that are not serious enough to justify the use of ethnic or racial criteria. It can be used when its basis is simple bigotry. But virtually any law enforcement technique that is appropriate for some situations can be used illegally or immorally in other situations. The only remedy for such abuse is constant vigilance by higher government officials, the media, and the public to assure that profiling is only used when it is appropriate to do so. The danger from
terrorism in the United States is now so grave and so clear that the need for profiling easily satisfies any such standard.

Political correctness cannot be allowed to divert this country away from targeting in airports and other dangerous situations the people most likely to be terrorists. We should not be wasting time, and effort, and money checking people who almost certainly are not dangerous, just so we can pretend that we are treating all people alike. Should we really check carefully 80-year-old black grandmothers, so we can say that we are not singling out 25-year-old Arabs? The answer is so obvious that it is only common sense.

BRUCE J. TERRIS is an attorney, practicing in Washington D.C. His area of concentration is "Public Interest Law."
 
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