Study Finds Ethnic Profiling Useless in Preventing Terror

[Cees Binkhorst]

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Dus wat moet er nu gebeuren om ook in Nederland hier mee op te houden?
Het zou het hele vreemdelingendebat opfrissen.

Groet / Cees

Study Finds Ethnic Profiling Useless in Preventing Terror
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,626886,00.html
By Andrew Curry

A new study has found that ethnic profiling is worse than useless when it
comes to preventing terror attacks and has never led to a terrorism
conviction in Europe. The findings could have profound implications for
police work at all levels.

Since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, racial or ethnic profiling has
been a source of controversy worldwide. While it makes intuitive sense to
many people that certain groups are more likely to be involved in
terrorism than others, courts in the US have tended to rule that the
practice of stopping people based on their appearance or religion is
illegal.

In Europe, the legal situation is much muddier. Again and again, data
mining, targeted raids and systematic discrimination on the local level
have singled out specific ethnic and religious groups in Europe as
authorities try to head off future attacks.

In a study released on Tuesday, the Open Society Institute
(http://www.justiceinitiative.org/) -- a think tank and
democracy-promotion organization funded by billionaire George Soros --
argues that racial profiling of Muslims is essentially a public relations
tool designed to make people feel safer in the immediate aftermath of a
terror attack. After the 2006 bus and subway bombings in London, for
example, highly publicized raids on mosques or ID checks in Muslim areas
gave the public the impression the police were taking action.

The report, entitled "Ethnic Profiling in the European Union," argues that
profiling is both ineffective and counterproductive, pointing out that
"stops and searches conducted under counterterrorism powers in Europe have
produced few charges on terrorism offenses and no terrorism convictions to
date." At the same time, targeting specific communities alienates them,
"contributing to a growing sense of marginalization in minority and
immigrant communities."

Ironically, high-profile incidents of racial or ethnic profiling have
declined in the last few years. "That's partly because there hasn't been a
major terrorist attack recently," Rachel Neild, one of the study's authors
and a senior adviser at the Open Society Institute's Justice Initiative,
told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "But one of the reasons we're still concerned is the
reason ethnic profiling has gone down has nothing to do with public
outrage" over the tactic itself.

The argument up until now has mostly hinged on the idea that stopping
people most likely to commit crimes or be involved in a terror attack is
the best way to apply limited law enforcement resources. But the report
examines data from across Europe to make the opposite argument. "Police
know it's not effective," Neild says. "We want to work with local law
enforcement to solve this problem."

The arguments on the other side tend to focus on human rights and civil
liberties, but until now neither side has had much data to present. The
new study echoes the findings in a report released by the institute
earlier this month that may change that. The study, entitled "Addressing
Ethnic Profiling by Police: A Report on the Strategies for Effective
Police Stop and Search Project," is the result of 18 months of research on
police stops in Spain, Bulgaria and Hungary.

In that study, the Justice Initiative worked with police to collect data
on ethnicity and criminality, comparing the ethnicity of people stopped by
police to those actually found to have committed a crime or offense. "In
every pilot site, police were profiling people based on ethnicity or
national origin," the study reports. "Minorities were more likely to be
stopped, often more likely to be searched, but, almost without exception,
were no more likely to be found to be offending than the majority group."

In all three countries, when police were required to record the details of
traffic and other police stops, a pattern emerged: minorities were far
more likely to be stopped by police than the local ethnic majority, but
equally or even less likely to commit crimes. At pilot sites in Hungary,
for example, police were three times as likely to stop Roma as ethnic
Hungarians, "yet the rate at which each group is detected in the
commission of an offense is almost identical." In some areas, the data
showed ethnic minorities were even less likely to be offenders than the
local majority.

The simple act of asking police officers to record the details of their
stops made a difference: The more paperwork involved, the fewer stops cops
were likely to make in the first place. But applying more stringent rules
to how and when police could stop people also changed their behaviour
dramatically, and resulted in fewer innocent people being hassled.
"Training officers to think about who they were stopping and why led to a
reduction in stops and an increase in effectiveness," Neild says.

The authors of the "Ethnic Profiling in the European Union" study claim
that such profiling is not only ineffective, it's counterproductive. "It
misdirects law enforcement resources and alienates some of the very people
whose cooperation is necessary for effective crime detection," the study
says.

With more research into police practices, perhaps the conventional wisdom
about how best to catch crooks and terrorists will be upended for good. At
the moment, police tactics seem based more on hunches than facts. "It's
interesting how much stereotypes drive decision making," Neild says.

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