Profiling is good

Political correctness is relegating the term "profiling" to the unacceptable bin.
For me, profiling is an essential aspect of life. When I approach the check out counters at the supermarket I profile in terms of length of the lines and fullness of the carts before I make my choice. I profile restaurants in terms of my past experience with the food and with the service and sometimes I add to my profile the opinion of my friends. The really helpful aspect of thinking in terms of profiling is that it leads me to evaluate whether my profiling terms continue to be helpful, to discard unhelpful characteristics and perhaps add new ones.

Recent terrorist activities and heightened security at airports should indeed call for an examination of the terms of profiling. If characteristics such as luggage or no luggage, age, sex, ticket purchased with cash or with credit card, originating airport, color of hair, or dare I say religion or race are found to correlate with attempts at terrorist acts then such profiling should logically be linked to the level of security inspection.

It is a waste of time and money doing a 100% inspection of everyone. The focus of attention should be on those who have characteristics associated with risk. Of course debate should continue with respect to the characteristics that are used. In the case of airport screening it is entirely possible that a different set of characteristics will be employed in different countries or even at different airports.

Now think of the roadside stops during holiday weekends in which the police are concerned primarily with inebriation. Is it fair to be more suspicious of muscle cars, adjacency to pubs, odor of alcohol, bleary eyes, nervousness, odor of marijuana, youths, and noisy passengers? I think yes.

What is needed now is a more vigorous debate on the profiles that are used. When someone berates the use of race (or religion or age or……) X in profiling then the appropriate question is " What is the evidence that race X has a proportionally higher probability of exhibiting behavior Y?"