Profiling works though. It's just a fact of police work. Sometimes though, profiling leads to bad situations.
Fact: Police regularly stopped and harassed people with modified vehicles that use to cruise the 10-15mi dual highway in a town about 30 minutes from me. When they stepped up a bigger presence and cracked down on these people (yes, I like my toys), the fights, loitering, and vandalism at several places in the area went down drastically, not to mention the amount of people "street racing" through a populated area. Profiling certain individuals with a certain taste in modifying vehicles reduced crime.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, and goes to the pond with the other ducks........it's a duck.
Fact: Police/Security have been stopping and harassing photographers even when they're not breaking any laws because of the whole big stigma of photographers are terrorist mastermings here to document sites and plan attacks on us. Many, many, many bad arrests have been made. The risk of terrorism has not dropped dramatically and many people are still dying from bombings around the world even though Joe Dirt was arrested for taking pictures of a courthouse in Nebraska last week.
This is where sometimes a lack of knowledge and a possibly over bearing belief in the right of the individual vs the right of the collective can come into play. The right of the individual vs the right of the collective is a fine balance that constantly shifts. It is a delicate balance. It is a balance that I do not believe any one individual can fully decide. It is constantly shifting.
The gathering of intelligence is far from the cloak and dagger world that the average person believes in, just as tv has distorted the true world of law enforcement. A vast majority of intelligence work is very mundane. Reading of newspapers, magazines, tv news broad casts etc. The vast amount of information gathered from such things is unbelievable. The things that inadvertantly turn up in the news and other places is amazing. Though not an item of great intelligence, an excellent example of things that happen to inavertantly get caught and get published. This was by google no less [FONT=arial,helvetica,helv]
Google scrubs urinating woman from Street View • The Register[/FONT]
Yep, every day by everyone. If you set out certain criteria that is a profile. When you look for what matches those defined criteria you are profiling.
In law enforcement profiling is a set of critera that fits the situation. Say that a bank is robbed and the suspect is described as a white female, 30-40 ish medium build, that covers a lot of people and that is a perfectly acceptable profile. To stop a black male as a suspect in this incident is not only proposterous but is racial profiling.
Opinion: I agree that racial profiling is bad.
Nope. FACT!
Fact: Technically there's three races on Earth. Caucasian, Mongoloid, and Negroid. Those are the three scientifically defined races.
Nope, there is no single scientifically or anthropologicaly accepted theory of race.
One theory has the following 5 races of man.
Caucasoid: Europe, West Asia and North Africa.
Mongoloid: East Asia, Oceania, the Arctic and the Americas.
Negroid: Sub-Saharan Africa.
Capoid: Southern Africa.
Australoid: Australia and Melanesia.
A second theory has 6 races of man.
Angola Man
Indonesian Man
Gypsy Man
Northern White Man
African Black Man
China Man
Anthropologist can not come up with an accepted set of rules to define race.
Opinion: So take 1/3 of the world's population (theoretically) and target them for doing whatever it is you think that they all do and you can talk about racial profiling.
No longer applies. Even law enforcement across the country does not have a defined set of races accepted or used by all. Racial profiling has in some ways become a catch term for ethnic profiling, which in itself is wrong when that ethnicity is the only reason for law enforcement to act.
Anyways, profiling happens. If it didn't, then there wouldn't be law enforcement jobs for people called "criminal profilers". Sometimes the results can be good, sometimes they can be bad.
It's when people start profiling based on stereotypes born of ignorance and fear that is can lead to harassment, murder, war, etc...
yep.