Gender Profiling: Should airport security ignore women?

David A. Harris, a professor at the University of Toledo College of Law, also objects to gender profiling, primarily because he doesn’t think the practice is very effective. Harris, the author of Profiles in Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work, has argued that profiling actually makes law enforcement agents less likely to catch criminals. He believes that they are forced to cast too wide a net, so as to scrutinize everyone who fits the profile, and irrationally exclude those who don’t fit the profile, whatever it may be. “All those people who fit the profile because of race or ethnicity have to be investigated and that just makes no sense,” he said. “We don’t have unlimited resources.”

Harris cites another instance of gender profiling. In the late 1990s, U.S. Customs, cracking down on drug smuggling, developed a set of search guidelines that in practice caused black women returning from the Caribbean to be stopped more frequently than any other group. After a series of complaints (the search rooms “had more in common with a gynecologist’s office than a customs office,” according to Harris) and a GAO report detailing the guidelines’ undesirable effects, customs agents abandoned them. As a result, they decreased their number of searches by 75 percent and nearly quadrupled their rate of busts. Instead of profiling, customs agents began relying on observation of nervous behavior, bulges in clothing, and drug-sniffing dogs.

A further problem with profiling, critics note, is that once the quarry knows the profile, chances are he will do his best to avoid it. Richard Reid, the Islamic fundamentalist terrorist who tried to detonate a bomb in his shoe in December 2001 on a flight from Paris to Miami, did so as a British subject, not a Middle Easterner on a U.S. student visa. In Israel, Palestinian terrorists have begun disguising themselves as non-Arabs, using Israeli military uniforms or the head-to-toe black garb of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men. Another good way to avoid fitting the profile is by being a woman: Terrorist groups in the Middle East have increasingly been using women as suicide bombers since the start of the latest Intifada three years ago, in large part to avoid detection by police and military patrolmen suspicious of Arab men.