Profiling – Part 2 - Why We Must Profile

A policeman can be arrested if he uses profiling to capture an illegal immigrant but the lawyer suing the cop can try to get a conviction by legally using jury profiling! How insane is that? Try googling jury profiling and you’ll get over 2.5 million hits including pages of expert jury profilers for hire and multitudes of papers and studies on the validity of juror profiling.

It seems to me that there is no longer too much dissension about the effectiveness of profiling. It works. Oh it’s not 100% perfect or even 80% perfect at times and there are a few instances where it doesn’t work at all. But in many situations, what profiling can do is give somebody an edge, an intelligent guess as to how a group of people would act based upon specific parameters. In the courtroom, if behavioral studies have shown that a specific subset of people will regard your client favorably then you would want to stack the jury pool with those kinds of people. Manipulating the jury box may seem unfair but the other side is doing the same thing so it works out pretty much evenly in the end. Or at least you can only hope so if you want to continue to believe in our jury process.

In police work, however, what they are typically doing is not profiling. It is factual conclusions. People are crossing the Mexican border illegally. 99.9% of these illegal immigrants are Mexicans. Therefore questioning people of apparent Mexican heritage is not profiling. It is following the facts. Now is every person with Mexican features who reside just across the border an illegal immigrant? No. On the other hand, is ever illegal immigrant residing in America just across the border from Mexico a Mexican? Ah, yeah, pretty much so.

So please, can anyone explain to me why this is prejudicial or profiling or racist? Race just happens to be the means of identifying someone from Mexico. This is rational thinking. Just as everybody would agree that it appears to be irrational when the elderly woman in a wheelchair is frisked at the airport in case she is carrying a bomb. Rationally we should be spending our limited time and funds on frisking people coming from or going to specific Middle Eastern countries or with one way tickets or no luggage.

Is it profiling if we concentrate efforts on frisking Middle Eastern men? Again, thinking rationally, the answer is no. Are all Middle Eastern men terrorists? No. Were all of the terrorists who tried to hurt America from the Middle East? Just about all of them lately. Another common denominator, perhaps even more defining than race, is religion, since all of them were Muslims. But let’s face it, unless you are looking for someone of the Amish faith or a Hassidic Jew it is very difficult to tell someone’s religion by their appearance.

This whole mess stems from Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin. Everyone knows that racial discrimination is wrong. You can't refuse service, for example, to someone because of their race. But, just for fun, I looked up the definition of discriminate which was to make a distinction in favor of or against a person or thing on the basis of the group, class, or category to which the person or thing belongs rather than according to actual merit. Huh. Maybe I have the wrong definition, for to me, the key is that last part about actual merit. Seems to me there is ample merit to show that the overwhelming majority of illegal immigrants from Mexico found in Arizona are Mexicans.

Then again, the lawyers poised to bring about lawsuits once the Arizona law goes into effect later this month aren’t talking about discrimination lawsuits. No, everyone is talking about racial profiling, instead. Now I think I am beginning to understand.

It can’t be discrimination if there is a factual reason behind it. Most illegal immigrants in Arizona are Mexicans therefore there is factual basis to asking people of Mexican race for identification. Since discrimination isn’t necessarily applicable, they plan to denounce it as racial profiling instead. For in profiling you assume a certain behavior or trait based on someone’s race or sex or some other characteristic found common within that group. So we’ve already established that the main common trait of Mexican illegal immigrants is that 99.9% are of Mexican race. But racially profiling is illegal. Again, I looked up the federal law.

It is telling to read the introduction to the federal law prohibiting racial profiling: Racial profiling at its core concerns the invidious use of race or ethnicity as a criterion in conducting stops, searches and other law enforcement investigative procedures. It is premised on the erroneous assumption that any particular individual of one race or ethnicity is more likely to engage in misconduct than any particular individual of another race or ethnicity.

Racial profiling in law enforcement is not merely wrong, but also ineffective. Race-based assumptions in law enforcement perpetuate negative racial stereotypes that are harmful to our rich and diverse democracy, and materially impair our efforts to maintain a fair and just society.

Here’s a novel idea – change the law. How can we maintain that fair and just society when burdened with the costs of the illegal immigrants? Where is the justice to those who waited in line to be admitted legally to our country? As for those negative stereotypes, sorry, but what is harmful to our society are Middle Eastern men who want nothing less than the annihilation of the United States. Someday those “stereotypes” just might save lives.