Profiling

Profiling is the idea of associating a type of crime to a particular demographic, and then targeting members of that demographic to higher levels of suspicion and police interference, purely based on the fact that they belong to that demographic.

There is an assumption perhaps not of guilt, but of ‘more likely to be guilty’, simply because someone belongs to a particular demographic.

It’s not hard to see how profiling could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the police believe that drug use is more prevalent in the young and they stop and search only the young, then they will find some youths carrying drugs and fail to find any older people carrying drugs and thus feed into their existing bias. Newspapers and social media would report on the scourge of drug use amongst young people. Cocaine snorting pensioners would scornfully comment about the youth of today. What you seek you find.

I was at a conference fairly recently and chatting to an American man, and very briefly, almost flippantly, and as somewhat of a non-sequitur, he expressed the idea that profiling was a good idea, and he could indeed see a place for it. No one else seemed to want to engage in the debate, so just as quickly as he voiced his opinion the topic drifted away. It was like one of those random thoughts that pass through your head almost unnoticed.

And almost as randomly I am sitting here thinking about it today, several months later, and I have no idea why.

I strongly suspect that he was so comfortable with the idea of profiling because he did not fit the demographic of people who are typically profiled.

I suspect he would be less in favour of profiling if he was occasionally checked on for domestic abuse or paedophilia or serial killing. I don’t imagine he’d be quite so relaxed if the police knocked on his door and asked to check his electronic devices simply because he was male and most consumers of child pornography are men.

Profiling is Inherently racist

Profiling only has any benefit if it significantly narrows down the pool of potential suspects. If the pool remains too big it’s not profiling at all. For instance, if you stopped and searched people based on the fact, they fit the profile of a human being and that all knife crime is committed by human beings, then your identification of potential suspects is essentially random and you are no closer to identifying a perpetrator of knife crime. The bigger the pool, the more random the selection, and the less effective the tool of profiling. The bigger the pool, the less profiled the crime.

This means that profiling only has meaning in a diverse society, where we can place people into groups that are significantly smaller than the whole. The more homogeneous a society is the less possible it is to profile people. It also means that the smaller the group, the more value there is in profiling.

If city A is racially diverse, and city B is racially homogenous, only city A would benefit from racial profiling. Similarly, if a particular type of crime is associated with a particular racial group and that group forms the vast majority of society, it serves no purpose to target individuals who belong to that group. Hence profiling is a tool to be used against minorities, and hence it is inherently racist.