Racial profiling undermines security, liberty

August 22, 2005

As a New Yorker, I ride the subway almost every day.

Since July's subway bombings in London, I, like other New Yorkers, have been gripped by the fear of global terrorism hitting our city's mass transit system. In response, police have
begun randomly checking bags of straphangers to deter would-be suicide bombers.

But as an Arab and Muslim man, it's not only the terrorists who concern me. In a city where calls for racial profiling are becoming increasingly loud, I fear the police, too.

Profiling is wrong not only because it's racist. It's also wrong because it's dangerous.

This point was made tragically clear on July 22, when police in London killed Jean Charles de Menezes. The Brazilian electrician was shot seven times in the head at point-blank range when police mistakenly believed he was a terrorist. Initially, authorities defended the shooting by pointing to Menezes' strange choice of clothing and his nervous behavior.

But the latest testimony and video evidence from England reveal that everything we were told about the killing was false. Menezes was not wearing a bulky coat that could conceal a bomb, but instead a light denim jacket that couldn't hide anything. He did not run from the police and jump a turnstile. In fact, he walked calmly through the station, even picking up a free newspaper. Most frightening is the fact that the police actually restrained him before shooting him to death.

Menezes' death is the nightmare of every Arab and Muslim man traveling in the West today, a fatal case of the futility of profiling.

While the rest of the United States or United Kingdom contends with the random violence
of terrorists, Arab and Muslims -- and, in fact, all brown-skinned people -- must now worry about three different types of attacks: from terrorists, vigilante racists and the police.

More than 1,200 racist hate crimes -- from verbal abuse to one murder -- have been recorded in England since July 7, according to The Guardian newspaper. For Arabs and Muslims, this adds to a sense of frustration mingled with anger.

It's not enough to say, as many do, that terrorism is a Muslim problem. Muslims around the world have loudly and rightly denounced terrorism. But it hasn't made much difference. Why? Because extremists in Islam are not part of the mainstream community. (That's why they are extremists.)

Moreover, extremism and terrorism don't develop in vacuums. Terrorism is an immoral response to political circumstances, cloaked in the language of religion.

Since we all live now increasingly in one world, defeating terrorism has become everybody's responsibility.

But the quickest way to failure would be to heed recent calls by a few right-wing politicians and experts to legalize profiling and adopt it for the New York subway system.

Not only would real terrorists easily find ways to circumvent such a strategy, but our society's sense of fair play would be jettisoned. We would also be risking the safety of innocent people, as the London experience shows us.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair excused Menezes' slaying by arguing that the Brazilian electrician could have been a suicide bomber. By doing so, he was showing us how everyone -- not just Arabs, Muslims or other brown-skinned people -- is now potentially fair game to violence in the name of security.

Blair's flawed logic portends a terrible kind of policing in the age of terrorism. And it begs the question: Could something like the Menezes killing happen in the United States? Only if we let it.

Since Sept. 11 there has been a lot of talk about striking the right balance between liberty and security. Unless we recognize profiling for what it is, we will slowly be losing both.

Moustafa Bayoumi is a professor in the English department at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and co-editor of "The Edward Said Reader" (Vintage, 2000). He can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.