No Racial Profiling - Except When You Profile Racially

It'll take a wiser man than me to make heads and/or tails out of the new Justice Department ban on racial profiling. "Routine" profiling like that employed on traffic stops is evidently off-limits, but "trustworthy information" linking a particular race to something like terrorism or organized crime means profiling is just dandy.

I'm not even sure what profiling is any more or whether is it necessarily a bad thing. But these guidelines sound like if a fed calls it counter-terrorism, the investigation gets a free pass.

Comments

[Anonymous]

Hmmm, I wonder if the justice department's quotas for hiring minority applicants is considered racial profiling.

[Plutarck]

Of course not - it's for national security. Or the children. Or society. Take your pick.

[Amy Phillips]

The new powers granted the Justice Department under the PATRIOT Act are already being used in cases where terrorism plays no part. The lower standards for wiretaps and searches allow the feds to get into our homes and our lives with little warning or recourse. In other words, it's no surprise that people are using the tools given specifically to fight terrorism to catch people for other crimes. Welcome to the new world order, I suppose...

[dagny]

I think what it says is that you can't profile blacks, but you can profile Arabs.

[Craig]

Or profile white people when you're hunting a serial killer/sniper....

I'm not opposed to using race as part of a profile in principle, but it has to be part of a larger profile that generates a probable indication of a specific criminal activity by anyone who meets the profile.

It is not enough to say "anyone who meets criteria A-Z will be guilty of something", nor is it enough to say that "most perpetrators of crime X belong to profile Y".

If by 'trustworthy information', it means "meets the standard of probable cause", well, fine and dandy, even though that'd eliminate 99.99% of all profiling (and not just by race).

[Anonymous]

Why stop at outlawing racial profiling? What about eliminating the other groups of people like those with blue eyes, those who are 5' 10'", obese people, those with criminal records, those who were in the vicinity of 12th and main on July 17, 1995...