In defense of ethnic profiling
Prejudice for a safer world
Martin Luther King famously said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Amnesty International shares this dream; along with other human rights organizations, it had filed a lawsuit against the Dutch State in 2020. They demanded that the border police would quit ethnic profiling, as they routinely do with passengers at Schiphol Airport. According to them, checking people based on their ethnicity violates anti-discrimination laws.
Undoubtedly, it's very annoying if you are often stopped and checked by the police, just because of your appearance. However, it is actually quite reasonable and useful.
Skinheads
Of course we would like to judge others by their character and not by the groups to which they belong. But often that’s just not possible. Suppose you walk down an alley late at night and you see four strangers ahead. It would make a huge difference whether these individuals are four male skinheads or four old ladies in floral dresses.
Even the Amnesty International staff would then factor in their biases in deciding whether to take a detour or to continue walking. They would then discriminate on gender, age and appearance. And that is a good thing, because everyone knows that crime among young men is many times higher than among old ladies. Some groups are simply a hundred times more prone to certain crimes than others. Those who never take that into account run the risk of arriving home robbed and injured
Specialties
What the border police do is basically no different. They apply ethnic profiling knowing that certain groups are more often involved in illegal immigration, human trafficking and identity fraud. Ethnicity is just one element of the risk profiles they create. All sorts of individual characteristics contribute to that profile, including gender, age, appearance and behavior.
The police also include ethnicity in their offender profiles. They too realize that different groups specialize in different types of crime. Men commit far more violent crime than women. In terms of poisoning, women stand their ground, although they are not the majority. White-collar crime, such as pyramid schemes and money laundering, is more common among white men than black men. With this knowledge, the police can more easily narrow down the number of suspects and more quickly apprehend the perpetrator.
Convictions
Some will counter that certain groups are more likely to be convicted precisely because they are checked so often. However, that is unlikely. Anyone who has ever watched programs like America’s Most Wanted can easily conclude that young people, men and ethnic minorities are overrepresented.
In the United States an annual National Crime Victimization Survey is conducted. Random people are asked whether they have been the victim of a crime in the past year and what the characteristics were of the perpetrator. The results correlate well with court convictions. In other words, the police and the judiciary, at least in the U.S., do not appear to be unfairly biased.
Waiting times
Suppose the border police stopped ethnic profiling. It would then have to spend the same amount of time and effort on an old white Norwegian woman in a floral dress as on a young Nigerian man wearing an expensive Rolex. Waiting times at the airport would grow, security costs would increase, and security would decline.
Personally, I value optimal security and I therefore accept that, as a man, I will be stopped and searched more often and more thoroughly than a woman. For the same reason, a well-meaning Nigerian person should accept that airport customs treat him or her with more suspicion than a Swiss man. This allows both of us to get on the plane with more confidence, with less fear of a terrorist bomb or the plane being hijacked.
Government discrimination
So if it’s okay that the government discriminates in the fight against crime, should it always be allowed to discriminate? No, it shouldn't. Regarding criminal justice, there is no reason why, for example, a black man should receive a higher sentence for a crime than a white man.
And neither should ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender make a difference when it comes to providing welfare or health care. But the government would be wise to take group differences into account when fighting crime. It acts similarly when trying to reduce traffic casualties; traffic safety campaigns are usually targeted at young male drivers because they cause relatively many crashes.
Luckily, Amnesty lost the aforementioned lawsuit. As long as the police rely on statistics, experience and facts, they are doing society a favor by ethnic profiling, just as with age, gender and behavioral profiling.
If we insist on treating everyone equally when fighting crime we become less efficient and therefore show less consideration to crime victims. Martin Luther King’s dream is an appealing ideal, but for optimal results it is generally best to also judge people on the groups they belong to.
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