(no subject)

[dreamer_easy]

And in the continuing quest to thwart anti-terrorism efforts by alienating the Muslim community, a former British police chief has got stuck into them. "I'm a white, 62-year-old, suit-wearing ex-cop - I fly often, but do I really fit the profile of a suicide bomber?" he asks. Perhaps not, although fellow critic of political correctness Theodore Kaczynski turned 64 this year.

ETA: Looking at this a month later I am still embarrassed by the lameness of my comparison with the Unabomber. To be honest, though, I'm still unclear on whether profiling is a sensible policing strategy; or just an excuse for tarring a whole community with the same brush.

Comments

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

And, of course, the second worst terrorist act ever committed on US soil is still the one committed by white christian young men with exemplary military service records.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

It seems like lazy police work to me to arrest people because of their ethnicity, rather than on good evidence, which is what this chap seems to be arguing for. OTOH, his opinions were published in News of the World rather than anywhere worthwhile, which makes me suspect he doesn't represent the mainstream of modern British policing.

[alawston.livejournal.com]

Heh, I saw the link to that when reading the previous article you flagged up and wondered when you'd get round to it...

Mentioning the 'Troubles' gave me pause for thought, though, at least none of these police types have actually called for internment of British Muslims. Yet.

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

Ok, I'll bite -

Are there any currently functioning groups who are so unconcerned with human life that they don't mind dying, as long as the people who they want dead end up that way?

Do those groups have anything in common?

Ignoring commonalities is poor policing at best, and an unwillingness to confront a problem head-on makes it all the more likely that the problem will not be solved.

Yes, that cop was impolitic, and that doesn't do anyone any favors. However, to dissect your counterexample a bit further, was Kaczynski willing to be a suicide bomber? Were McVeigh and Nichols suicide bombers? I would contend that different tactics will succeed against those three than would succeed against those people who are more concerned with killing others than their own survival.

[hiraethin.livejournal.com]

My point. Kaczynski was a letter-bomber... and McVeigh et al. used a truck for their single mass attack. Analysis of bombings aimed at aircraft, in particular, would suggest elderly white males are not the likeliest suspects.

"Profiling", or as I prefer to describe it, "pattern analysis", should take more into account than just the recent plot and a few white guys thrown in for diversity. It examines the commonalities shared by most offenders.

For example, terror offenders in the last 5 years are mostly male, but not always; mostly 18-35, but not always; and mostly muslims of arab ethnicity, though not always. That's not racial or religious prejudice. It's statistical analysis.

Back to the original post for a moment - certain former Police chiefs should know better than to make such remarks. Especially when they are newsworthy, as such a remark must inevitably be in the present climate. Not to mention that, profiling aside, security checks should apply to *everyone*, at least to a certain extent. Even 62-year-old white males. Else they are visibly weak.

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

Point well taken. As someone who gets stopped an awful lot (think network guy with 10,000 cables and 3 laptops), I have very little sympathy for complaints about being stopped. Anyone who knows me would say "duh, of course he's not a threat" but the point is that the security guys don't know me.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

British Muslims seem more upset about being arrested as terrorism suspects than being searched at airports.

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

duh.

Of course they do - I would be more upset about being arrested as a terrorism suspect than being searched, as well.

However, if there were an anonymous tip that I was involved with some horrific plan, I would fully expect to be arrested if there were the slightest plausibility of truth - i.e if I were being accused of plotting which involved air travel, having recently been at airports would add that slight plausibility.

I don't know about this particular case, because (unsurprisingly) the facts are not all public. I have not read anything in the news which would lead me to believe that significant numbers of people have been groundlessly arrested - do you have a source for such a belief?

Rather, I find this article (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1843562,00.html), along with the associated comments, fascinating.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

See here.

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

But in the case currently making news, the informant was part of the Muslim community!

I can imagine that decent, law-abiding Muslims feel quite put upon - the folks who espouse mass murder claim loudly to be acting in their name and on their behalf. The hope is that the decent, law-abiding Muslims will throw whatever constituent element of their community is espousing such horrors to the wolves, and expel them from their communities. These arrests may be a step in a positive direction. Or maybe not - I don't know.

I do know, however, that while decent, law-abiding Muslims remain silent, the mass-murder-espousing Muslims have a much freer hand.

Burke said: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. He was right then, and is still right today.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Decent, law-abiding Muslims seem keen to cooperate with the authorities, but you can see how hundreds of apparently baseless arrests would put them off.

I'm disturbed by the frequent suggestion that it's the Muslim community's own fault that its innocent members are being arrested. To draw a very rough analogy, while most men are not rapists, almost all sexual assaults are committed by men; but when bad police work puts an innocent man in jail, the blame attaches to the police, not to men as a whole.

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

True.

But is anyone surprised when, after a series of rapes, several innocent people who could possibly meet the description of the rapists are arrested/placed under suspicion?

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

I think the police are generally supposed to have a bit more to go on than "looks a bit like the criminal" before they start arresting people! I think they should also have a bit more to go on than "was named by a single informant who was basically bribed and/or threatened", if what that lawyer says is true. As I said, I can understand the fear of missing a genuine tip-off amongst all the baseless ones, but surely a theat this serious needs more thorough investigation and a better use of resources.

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

I assume you're familiar with the concept of a lineup (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_lineup) - many, if not most, suspects for many crimes get arrested on a suspicion, not on proof - proof is for courts to decide, anyway.

Also, I'd hesitate before taking a lawyer's opinion at face value - he is allowed to speak as freely, and as truthfully or truthlessly as he likes, while the police are enjoined from behaving the same way.

Think for one moment what the evidence would have been before 9/11 which would have led to the arrests of the plotters: it would have been pretty thin stuff, right? Box cutters on planes, flight school attendance - heck, both of those are legal... Details which prove a conspiracy to commit mass murder are not going to be written in three-foot-high letters on the wall, right?

I'm just saying I tend to give the police the benefit of the doubt in cases like these - the consequences of them being too relaxed is mass murder, while the consequence of them being too paranoid is pissing a few dozen people off.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

I've been talking about evidence, not "proof". Besides, a witness trying to pick out a criminal from a lineup is generally neither threatened or bribed.

"Pissing a few dozen people off" would be one thing. The public shooting of an innocent man is another. So are hundreds of fruitless arrests, and high-profile raids - not to mention thousands of largely useless stop-and-searches - which piss off the very community best placed to help the police.

I'm reading bits of Seymour Hersh's book Chain of Command, which includes a chapter on the intelligence failures before 9/11. I've only skimmed that, but apparently FBI agents were concerned about the flight students; further, the CIA reported that bin Laden was planning to attack America soon. They had good evidence, but it wasn't acted on.

It's easy to see how the horror of that hindsight could drive police to follow even the flimsiest leads. And, in principle, I don't disagree with you - I'd rather they followed a lot of negative leads than missed a positive one. In practice, though, it's not ony wrecking innocent lives, it's damaging their ability to get those positive leads, and contributing to the atmosphere of enmity which stimulates terrorism in the first place.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

One successful tactic would be to arrest suspects on the basis of good evidence, rather than on the basis of flimsy evidence plus their ethnicity.

To be fair, I suspect that British authorities are so afraid of missing a real plot that they'll investigate any number of imaginary ones. That's understandable, but inevitably counterproductive.

[phlegethon-vii.livejournal.com]

Although, Kaczynski always looked a bit like a weirdo, and conducted himself in a weirdo-like way...at least, he *was* by the time he was making parcel bombs :p

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

A weirdo? Did he do any News of the World interviews? he he he

[mrteufel.livejournal.com]

How about profiling by age and gender? We know the large majority of suicide bombers are male, aged between 20 and 50 (probably younger.) So paying special attention to that group should help with efficiency.

But one problem profiling creates is that it's fairly obvious who you're targetting, so terrorists may turn their efforts to finding people who don't fit the profile to do their work. But it would make their job harder, which itself is a good thing.