Ethnic groups not ‘search target’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4737777.stm

Police have stepped up their presence since the London attacks Police should not rule anyone out when using stop and search powers to prevent further bomb attacks, Home Office minister Hazel Blears has said. She spoke after British Transport Police suggested young ethnic minority men were more likely to be stopped.

Ms Blears said she had “never, ever endorsed” the use of racial profiling.

“You can equally have white people who could be the subject of intelligence”, she told the BBC. “I don’t accept it is right simply to target groups.”

Ms Blears began a series of meetings with Muslim leaders on Tuesday in an attempt to improve community relations.

Package of powers

The BTP had said it did not intend to “single out” any particular community.

But a spokesman said it would “target the people who we think are maybe involved… it may be disproportionate when it comes to ethnic groups”.

Exercise this power on the basis of the intelligence available to you and you explain that to communities

Hazel Blears

Police warned on stop and search

In the past Mrs Blears has said she believed innocent Muslims would accept that they may be more likely to be targeted in the search for Islamic extremists.

She told BBC Radio 4′s Today programme on Tuesday: “I have said time and time again to police in the guidance I have issued that you exercise this power on the basis of the intelligence available to you and you explain that to communities.

“That is the way you get their trust and confidence.”

The minister said stop-and-search had to form part of a “package of powers”.

“Tackling terrorism is absolutely dependent on the confidence of these communities to feel that they can come forward, give information and be part of the fight against this threat,” she said.

‘Extraordinary times’

The BTP remarks prompted the legal adviser to the National Black Police Association’s to say people from ethnic minorities would understand being stopped by police after the London bomb attacks.

Ch Supt Ali Dizaei said this would be true as long as people were treated courteously and given an explanation.

“These are extraordinary times and people are committed from all communities to work together with the police in order to sort this problem out,” he said.

But civil rights group Liberty said terrorists could just use bombers with a different profile to avoid targeted stops by police officers.

And Muslim Council of Britain spokesman Inayat Bunglawala warned the strategy could be “counter-productive”.

“While it is understandable that the police need to undertake every step to thwart would-be bombers it is crucial that they do not unnecessarily alienate and stigmatise an entire segment of society,” he said

If there was a New York style terrorist attack in a rural and white part of the country and the attack was carried out by swarthy men, the browns there might have more problems than worrying about the statements by two of the state senators.

Here is a sample:

• Police should seek to avoid looking at unclad Muslim women and allow them an opportunity to dress and cover their heads. • For reasons of dignity officers should seek to avoid entering occupied bedrooms and bathrooms even before dawn. • Use of police dogs will be considered serious desecration of the premises and may necessitate extensive cleaning of the house and disposal of household items. • Advice should be sought before considering the use of cameras and camcorders due to the risk of capturing individuals, especially women, in inappropriate dress. • Muslim prisoners should be allowed to take additional clothing to the station. • If people are praying at home officers should stand aside and not disrupt the prayer. They should be allowed the opportunity to finish

Maybe they should even call in their raids 24 hours or more in advance, so that the suspects can prepare themselves properly…

Also, in practice, I’d guess that “random searches” are never totally random, so lets be real and say we’re talking about minimal, subconscious profiling (of some kind or another) vs. overt, systematized profiling.

btw, if anyone wants to have the $hit scared out of them, watch this documentary on Indian Point. Maybe some of the cops at the turnstiles could be moved upstate a little bit to keep all of Manhattan from becoming uninhabitable?

Do you have a link for P(M|T) = 0.99? It’s an incomplete metric regardless. There are plenty of bombers who are neither Muslim nor defined as terrorists by the State Department, e.g. Eric Rudolph. The Columbine teens built a bomb, it just didn’t work– that will change as bomb tech gets commoditized.

Racial profiling can be useful in intelligence work. But once a carrier is at the subway station, there’s no better metric than being able to detect the bomb itself, regardless of what the carrier looks like.

Doubtful that they can draw equally from each pool. This is the core fallacy…

For attacks which only need four people to execute, there are plenty of potential recruits from each pool. These are not high-scale or high-knowledge operations. The teens were essentially mules. Last week, Brit intelligence was still arguing over whether the carriers knew it was a suicide op.

P(T|M) = .00001 (or less), but P(M|T) = .99 (according to State Department Report on Terrorism). That is, the probability that someone is a terrorist given that they’re Muslim is low, but the probability that someone is a Muslim given that they’re a terrorist in the US is very high (and if you say “Tim McVeigh”, you don’t know what the word “probability” means).

Given background assumptions on P(M) in the population, you can work out the explicit Bayesian profiling decision.

The pool of Muslim phenotypes is enormous; they can tap Chechens, Uzbeks, Filipinos, Indonesians, Chinese, Malays, white converts, black Americans, red-haired Kashmiris, blue-eyed Afghans.

Doubtful that they can draw equally from each pool. This is the core fallacy: the pool of potential Swedish grandmother jihadists is far less than the pool of young brown males from predominantly Muslim countries.

btw, it’s great living a rural and white part of the country, isn’t it? all those new york liberals are so racist!