Alkahest my heroes have always died at the end

I’ve heard and read a number of people saying “political correctness be damned, we should use racial profiling to identify terrorists.” The problem I’ve always had with this is that it makes no sense. Try the following test, identify the terrorist:

1. young muslim male
2. young muslim female
3. asian male or female
4. caucasian male or female
5. black male or female
6. hispanic male or female

If you said that 1 and 2 have been terrorists and therefore we should profile them, you are partially right. However, what about all of the asian terrorists (e.g. Fillipinos)? Caucasians? Hmm, the IRA, David Koresh, Timmothy McVeigh, etc. As near as I can guess, the only racial groups that shouldn’t be profiled would be blacks and hispanics. This can’t work.

NBC Nightly News just had an interesting story on behavioral profiling being done at the airport in Orlando. Essentially, the police have been trained to look for suspicious behaviors, not suspicious racial characteristics. This is a much sane approach from the security perspective and can be much more effective with a lower rate of false positives.

POSTSCRIPT: from the security standpoint, any action needs to be considered from the risk mitigation standpoint. What’s the risk? What is the rate of false positives (FP) of the action? What are the costs of the FP? What is the rate of false negatives (FN)? Costs of the FN? etc, etc. Racial profiling fails under a risk mitigation analysis. Behavioral profiling may make sense.