Behavioural Profiling of Air Travellers urged

The article below says that 70,000 people were pulled aside in U.S. airports and screened very carefully. Behavioral Profiling is the tool that was used to identify them as potential risks. Of these 70,000 people, all of whom were no-doubt aggravated by the experience of being searched far more carefully than other travellers, only 700 were found to be in violation of some regulation. Note that this figure represents about 1% of the total.

Statistics are available from Police departments showing that very few
people in North America are inclined to commit serious crimes. If
memory serves, the figure is under 2%.

In this case we are told that airport police, when they really go out of their way to drive travellers nuts, manage to catch less than the number of criminals that would normally be expected to be passing through the airport. This suggests that Behavioral Profiling is not necessarily any better as a law enforcement tool than, for example, random spot-checks would be.

More telling, though, was the list of crimes that were being comitted by the travellers: It begins with Money Laundering. Under regulations enacted in the U.S. and other countries, travellers who are carrying more than a certain sum of money must carry documentation to prove that the money was legally earned - and most people don't. As a result, we see news reports of people being arrested for money laundering after they withdrew cash from the bank (for example to purchase a used car in a neighboring state.) The stats probably look great to the bureaucrats: "Wow! We caught people trying to launder money! They must be drug dealers!" But the truth is in the data collection methodology: If the arrest is logged before the trial - the data is meaningless. It might turn out that 90% of the people arrested were able to find the necessary paperwork and get the charges dropped - we won't know until the trial numbers are logged instead of the arrest numbers.

Fundamentally, our airports are an important part of our economy. We need them to run smoothly and when they don't our economy suffers. The real story here is that we are losing efficiency in recent years because of fear and foolishness in our airports. All the efforts made to secure the airports to date have not prevented any terrorist attacks. Most telling is that passengers have responded to the call and performed admirably (such as when they jumped on Richard Ried to prevent him from lighting his shoe-bomb.)

Perhaps the bureaucrats should ask themselves if being fearful is ever a good thing. We need to decide as a nation if fear is a good reason to disrupt our economy with the long list of useless and invasive measures that have been enacted since 2002.

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