Is Profiling really an American sin?

The use of profiling has such a negative stigma in this country, it is really sad. Sad because profiling is not the nasty, evil method that the left and liberals portray it to be. Israel, for years has used profiling to screen every airline passenger that boards an Israeli airline. Profiling is not the only method used but look at the number of terrorist attacks on the Israeli airline industry and you will find it zero going back many, many years. Profiling has now come to the top of many discussions in regard to the new bill Arizona just passed to combat illegal aliens coming into Arizona. Victor Davis Hanson has recently written a great op/ed on profiling and why it works when used judicously. It is not racist, nor is it the 1940's. Times have have radically changed and so must our country's policy in dealing with Illegal aliens and immigration. If the Feds refuse to do their job then it this becomes a state issue. Arizona has done just that and should be commended and supported rather than villified. No, profiling is not a horrible American sin until it is twisted, turned by the demosocialistacrats who clamor for open borders. They want nothing more than to pad the number of new voters who will benefit from coming here and sucking off the welfare state, at our expense.


FYI: I will be gone most of today as I am taking a rare break to go fishing for native Brown trout. I have been granted access to private property and am headed there. There will be new posts up late tonight.

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Arizona law is a proper use of profiling
By Victor Davis Hanson

Profiling is considered among the worst of American sins.

Not long ago, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested by the Cambridge, Mass., police for trying to enter his own locked home after misplacing his key. Almost immediately, President Barack Obama rushed to condemn what he thought was racial profiling. The police were acting "stupidly," Obama concluded. He added: "There's a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately."

Here is where the argument about an individual and the group turns nasty: Is using statistics on collective behavior a reasonable tool of law enforcement to anticipate the greater likelihood of a crime, or is it gratuitously stereotyping the innocent? Or sometimes both, depending on how it's done?

Take the Arizona anti-illegal-immigration law. It gives police the right to ask for identification papers if they have reasonable cause to suspect that those questioned on a separate matter may be in the country illegally. In heated reaction to this new state law, we now hear everything from calls for a boycott of Arizona to allegations of Gestapo-like tactics.

But is Arizona doing anything that much different from what most Americans do all the time — namely, using all sorts of generalized criteria to make what they think are play-by-the-odds judgments that may or may not be proven wrong by exceptions? The president himself did just

that when he said his own grandmother sometimes acted as a "typical white person." And he once stereotyped rural Pennsylvania voters as xenophobes clinging to their guns and religion.

More than 60 percent of voters nationwide either support the Arizona law or find it still too lax, according to polls. They apparently believe that a police officer can, in fact, make reasonable requests for identification. For example, if a trooper near the border pulls over a car for a missing taillight, finds that there are younger Latino males in the car and that none can understand English, can he then conjecture that there is a greater likelihood some might be Mexican nationals? The trooper, after all, is working within a landscape in which one in 10 Arizonans is an illegal immigrant from Latin America, and the state shares a 300-mile-long border with Mexico.

Otherwise, would it be OK for the border patrol to try to detain suspicious Latino males for possible immigration violations at or near the border, but not OK for police to ask for ID from the same person should he make it a few miles past the border?

Or imagine the reaction if nearly a million mostly poor, white French-Canadians were trying to cross into Vermont and New York from Canada each year. If those states felt such an influx were both contrary to federal statutes and a burden on their social service industries, could police rightly ask for ID from any French-speaking white males pulled over for traffic infractions — or do so only at or near the northern border? Would these French-speaking suspects likelier be illegal aliens than, say, Latino, English-speaking American citizens of Albany or Burlington?

When we weigh racial and gender stereotypes for what we deem are noble purposes, we call it "diversity," but when considering criteria other than one's individuality for matters of public safety, it devolves into "profiling"?

So what are we to make of the Arizona law?

First, rightly or wrongly, most Americans have long accepted some forms of both private and government profiling that draws on greater statistical likelihood. Second, should Arizona police start gratuitously pulling over U.S. citizens statewide and questioning them without cause, the law should — and will — be overturned. Third, far more illegal immigrants will be detained than before the law was passed.

And fourth, the third likelihood accounts for much of the angry reaction to the Arizona law.

Link to original article here

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