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.

A Proponent of Profiling - Part 1

I have absolutely no sympathy for the people who are protesting the use of profiling. In fact I think the whole anti profiling ideology is a bit insane. Arizona borders Mexico. Mexicans are illegally crossing that border. And yet the Arizona police can’t actively look for these illegal Mexicans because that would be profiling which is illegal. As I said, this is insane.

When it comes to profiling, I should admit that I am a bit prejudiced because I made my career by profiling in the private industry. I worked for two seemingly opposite industries – casinos and banks. But in both cases the same rule applied, studying past behavior can predict future behavior. Before technology changed things, both industries would send out mass mailings to all their customers offering the same product or service. Not only was this expensive but it resulted in a low rate of people actually buying that product or service.

Starting in the late 80’s companies began to get the hardware and software needed to computerize customer information. A lot of data was now being generated and for some reason I had a knack in analyzing all of this data on past behavior and demographics. I was in at the start of Harrah's famed players club and then at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas. In these casinos, I would profile their customers using information gathered from their member’s card, put players into segments based on their gaming and where they lived and then determined what offer was needed to generate the most profits from each segment. Thanks to profiling I helped casinos make a lot of money.

In banking you could go a step further and predict behavior based on a customer’s demographics. It is just common sense. But then again so much of profiling is just that, common sense. Anybody would figure out that a 25 year old probably doesn’t have the money for CDs but would need car loans or mortgages. On the other hand an 82 year old probably isn’t interested in on-line banking or a car loan. As I said, simple common sense is a big part of profiling. Demographics however could not help predict how much a person would gamble, if at all. Perhaps the only indicators that were ever used were to exclude nearly everyone who lived in Utah as Mormons didn't gamble but target people in Chinatown to visit when the casino was empty at Christmas. Otherwise neither age, income, race nor any other demographic indicator helped in explaining gaming habits. Luckily, demographic data does help in profiling almost every other kind of company.

It’s not just banking and casino who profile their customers. Every sophisticated industry has been doing this for years. Why do you think so many businesses now offer some kind of membership card that you show when making a purchase? This is used to collect data on your behavior and many companies will also include your demographics in their profiling of customers. How do they know your age, income, education etc? They send their customer file of names and addresses to outside companies who specialize in obtaining specific information about everybody. This data is retrieved from a variety of sources including all that information you provide when filling out warranty cards for example.

The company I once used to provide demographic data on bank customers guaranteed an 80% match. They could provide a bank with detailed information such as age, home value, race, marital status and even type of car you owned on up to 80% of every customer. Combining demographic information with your buying habits allowed us to accurately profile you. Based on that profile you will be sent offers that are targeted specifically for you.

So is this profiling a bad thing or is it simply good marketing? The truth is, for the most part, people love it. If CVS knows I frequently buy Coke then why would I be upset if they often give me coupons for Coke? It’s a win-win situation. You get offers for products you actually use and need and the company makes money. Everybody is happy – thanks to profiling. There is, however, one major drawback.

When profiling their customers, businesses often use outside companies that specialize in this. In fact that consulting team I managed was with a company that specialized in the financial industry. Now in order to profile First Federal Bank’s customers we needed two types of data – past behavior and demographics. Past behavior was obtained by having First Federal send in their computer files with all of their customer’s information. That’s right. Your banking data (name, address, SS, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, how much you had in your accounts, loan info etc.) could very well be sitting in some third party business office or worse on somebody’s laptop that they take home. And you would never know. Of course these third party businesses are supposed to follow tight security rules but I could walk through my old offices on any given day and see tapes or CDs with bank data sitting openly on people desks or PC's with bank data on the monitor and no one at the desk.

But it gets worse. In order to get that demographic data the company I worked for had to then send the names and addresses to yet another company. Granted, we never sent anything other than just name and address but nonetheless this information was being passed around and when returned contained specific demographic information about each customer. Shortly before I retired there was a scare when this demographic provider was hacked. There were also frequent news stories about other companies which had been hacked or worse, a laptop with all the customer data was lost or stolen. This is a serious problem but it is a security problem, not a profiling problem. Tighter security or providing companies with a means to profile their customers in-house will resolve this issue.

Profiling in the business sector is a win-win for everybody. Companies send offers targeted to you specifically and in doing so reduce their expenses and increase their profits. Everybody wins. So why is profiling considered to be atrocious in the public sector? Since I got rather carried away talking about business profiling I will tackle this question in my next blog.