Ruben Navarrette, Racial Profiling, and Trade-Offs

Ruben Navarrette’s op-ed piece on profiling is a perfect example of how the refusal to accept reality can delude someone into thinking he is living on a higher level than his fellows. Essentially, Navarrette says profiling Muslims to prevent terrorism is wrong and that anyone who considers doing so is a racist swine. He writes, “During an interview on ‘Fox News Sunday,’ host Chris Wallace asked Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff if we shouldn’t engage in ‘security profiling’ of Muslims who want to get on airplanes instead of ‘wasting time” screening 85-year-old grandmothers — even if such profiling isn’t ‘politically correct.” . . . [S]hame on those who would even ask the question.”

I am rather appalled that someone gets paid to opine so carelessly.

It is notable that Ruben does not define “profiling” of Muslims. He instead erects a strawman where 100% of Muslims would be searched. No one is proposing anything so pointless. Consider the 85-year-old grandmother example. Of course that kind of person should be ignored. The elderly are less prone to commit crime in general and terrorism in particular, as are women, as are native born Americans. These are statistically verifiable correlations.

Resources are not infinite. Our security forces cannot screen everyone. They must triage every person they see, selecting some for more intensive searches, while bypassing others. In this sense, everyone is being profiled regardless of the intentions of the screeners and regardless of whether passengers are subject to heightened scrutiny or not.

Profiling imposes costs on some people to relieve the pressure on the remainder. It has the twin benefits of concentrating resources where they would be most effective, while minimizing the impact of a security regime on the innocent. Rather than requiring extended searches of every passenger (or doing so in an ineffective and random way), only those with factors indicating a heightened possibility of being terrorists are searched. The only question that should be asked is whether those predictive factors—age, sex, name, destination, amount of luggage, one way tickets, lots of vacations in Afghanistan, etc.—are in fact predictive of a heightened terrorist thereat or not. None of these traits are a stigma; they are employed, and should be employed, because they show heightened risk.

The use of profiling is justified partly because of the utter imbalance of costs and benefits. On the cost side, a small number of travellers will be subject to added scrutiny, not lifelong interment. Some might be inconvenienced and annoyed, some might miss a flight, and others will be outraged because they had to endure the indignity of being judged by a “kuffir.” These costs must be compared to the benefit of avoiding a massive loss of life, avoiding the ensuring economic loss, and also the costs of still greater security measures in the wake of any future attacks.

Navarrette take pains to show his moral courage by condemning Japanese internment camps set up long before he was born and long after the Japanese were defeated. (I’ll bet he supports universal suffrage and the abolition of slavery too). But he does not answer the crucial questions facing us today: (a) whether profiling of any kind might be effective; and, (b) how many lives he is willing to give up to take a moral stand against such a system. That’s the trade-off that he refuse to acknowledge, but that actually exists. He instead pirouettes with the kind of moral superiority that can only come from someone whose toughest decision each day is where to place a semi-colon.

Navarette erects and then attacks a strawman not to inform his readers, but to show off his own virtue. Shame on him.

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