On a normal week I get at least a few hits on the site from people searching for information on “racial profiling.” The last few weeks though have shown a huge increase in the number of visits from people searching for racial profiling. This is of course in response to the news coverage of the Trayvon Martin killing and the resulting outcry to put a stop to racial profiling.
It couldn’t be more fitting that this story has been immediately followed in the news by the start of the trial for Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian who killed 77 unarmed civilians last July in a mission to strike back against multiculturalism and Islam.
This is why we don’t teach racial profiling.
Pre-determined factors such as skin color or gender aren’t an indicator of person’s capability to inflict harm on others. Life style choices, such as religious preferences, are not indicators of a person’s potential or desire to kill others. People have killed in the name of the God (by whatever name they call him) since the beginning of time. People of all ages, both male and female, from every possible corner of the Earth and every shade of skin have carried out atrocities throughout our history.
This is why we don’t teach racial profiling.
Racial profiling is simply unreliable. What is reliable as a means to stop crime is understanding human behavior. A person’s inability to completely hide their intentions allows us pick up on those behavioral cues that are truly indicative of threats, and are what we can observe and “profile” to stop an attack or crime before it takes place. Even when a person does everything possible to conceal their intentions, their focus on the body language they are displaying will prevent them from acting completely natural. They will still stand out from the baseline, and not because of their race.
The reality of the matter though, is that we live in an age where every person on the street has a video camera and any action a police officer, Marine, or any concerned citizen takes will face the scrutiny of countless Monday morning quarterbacks. With 24-hour news agencies needing to fill slow news days, pseudo-experts with correspondence course degrees will make claims that those actions were the result of racial profiling, bigotry, and countless other biases. If you don’t believe them, they will just talk louder until you can’t hear your own thoughts and keep arguing.
What all of this means is that not only do we need the ability to pick up on reliable cues, but we also need to be capable of justifying our actions. If you make the decision to stop someone, or even make the decision to kill the anomaly that is in front of you, people will always claim that it was a result of racial biases and racial profiling. If you are a true professional and dedicate yourself to truly understanding the material presented on this site, you will be able to keep your honor clean. The Supreme Court Case Terry v. Ohio concluded that police officers can search any person they contact on the street as long as they have a justifiable reason for doing so. Communicating a person’s behavior using the 6 Domains of observable behavior can provide that justification. The domains are based on validated scientific fields. You can use them with confidence here in America as well as while deployed overseas.
But the domains are based on behavior, not observations that are only “skin deep,” and that is why we don’t waste our time teaching racial profiling.