New Daily Standard Article: "Spare No Resource"

By Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

My new article, "Spare No Resource," was posted today at the Daily Standard.  Although New York City police decided last week to scale back the increased security that accompanied the most recent subway terrorism scare, the fact remains that the terrorists would like to strike our mass transit system, and that this system remains vulnerable.  I took the title of my article from Mayor Bloomberg's statement at the October 6 press conference about his determination to safeguard the subways:  "We will spare no resource; we will spare no expense."  I found this statement unintentionally revealing, since New York City could spare resources, spare expenses, and make passengers safer if it used terrorist profiling.

A few key paragraphs from the piece:

The argument for profiling is simple and compelling:  If our last line of defense is searching bags before riders enter the subway, our searches should target the passengers who are most likely to be terrorists.  Only through intelligently targeted searches can we have a reasonable chance of disrupting terrorist plots.  This means we should try to figure out how terrorists look and act -- and that law enforcement should be trained in taking these factors into account.

Because this case is intuitive and hard to refute (why would we treat, say, U.S. senators the same as Mohamed Atta?), the opponents of profiling seemingly turn to autopilot when arguing against it, throwing out every claim that could possibly support their position with little critical filter.  [Former FBI agent Mike German, who wrote a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed defending New York's random searches] does this when he argues that completely random bag searches are just as effective as profiling.  And his case begins with the creation of a false dichotomy, in which one option is the most awkward kind of profiling done solely on the basis of race, and the other option is random searches.

Thankfully, other choices lie along the spectrum between these two extremes.  A truly effective system of terrorist profiling would not look solely at a person's race in determining whether extra scrutiny is justified.  Rather, a range of factors--including gender, age, dress, and behavior--can be used to identify the most likely terrorists.  Surely there can be no argument against considering these non-racial factors. . . .

The bottom line is that one cannot sustain the argument that purely random bag searches are as effective as training police to identify potential terrorists by taking into account the wealth of information we have on how they look and act. . . .  We can continue with the present "spare no resource" approach in times of crisis.  But we'd spare more resources, and be safer for it, if terrorist profiling were one of the tools in our anti-terror arsenal.

Read the whole article here.

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