Daily Times

In the last few years, the environment for terrorism has changed immensely. Much like a virus, those who seek to harm have been able to adapt and evolve their strategies to plan heinous attacks. Terrorists do not fit a profile and cannot be plucked out of crowds by computers. Profiling communities in counter-terrorism efforts is ineffective. Focus on one particular ethnicity or country of origin and the terrorists will recruit from somewhere else. Profiling does not help against individuals with different names and ethnic backgrounds. They are European, Asian, African, Hispanic and Middle Eastern, male and female, young and old. Saad Aziz, who studied in the BBA programme at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) in Karachi, was the mastermind behind Sabeen Mahmud’s murder and the main accused in the Safoora incident.

Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab was Nigerian. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was British with a Jamaican father. Germaine Lindsay, one of the 7/7 London bombers, was Afro-Caribbean. Dirty bomb suspect Jose Padilla was Hispanic-American. The 2002 Bali terrorists were Indonesian. Timothy McVeigh was a white US citizen. So was the Unabomber. The Chechen terrorists who blew up two Russian planes in 2004 were female. Palestinian terrorists routinely recruit ‘clean’ suicide bombers and have used unsuspecting westerners as bomb carriers.

Would stereotype terrorist profiling have identified Saad Aziz as a threat? No, because the current strategy of profiling terrorists is to select only those of a certain ethnic origin for further questioning and Saad Aziz looks nothing like a person of the stereotype ethnicity. Racial profiling would not have been effective in the case of this terrorist; it was his behaviour that caused his capture. This proves that terrorists have evolved their strategies for attacks to weave their way through security forces and that they are capable of outsourcing their activity to people from Afghanistan, India, Chechnya or Uzbek nationalities. This renders the practice of racial profiling to be much less useful than people previously believed. If security agencies had studied his behaviour, the likelihood of this man successfully killing would have been greatly reduced. The question, right now in May 2015, is: should intelligence agencies continue to use stereotype profiling to combat terrorism?

There are many angles from which to look at. One of those angles is through the looking glass of security and law enforcement. If people are judged based on their character, which is an umbrella that can encompass things such as suspicious behaviour, then plans to harm this country will be foiled much more easily. Racial profiling in a way negatively affects intelligence analysis because it isolates one group of people, it no longer serves as a tool to narrow the suspect pool and it does not teach security personnel how to read behavioural signs of danger. Catching terrorists and criminals is simply a battle of wits; it is a chess game that must be played with the evolution of strategy in mind.

Contrary to what seems to be popular belief, the use of racial profiling to identify criminals and terrorists has detrimental effects on the entire country. Due to the fact that profiling singles out one group of people, it can cause individuals of that group to loathe security forces. The effect of exercising racial profiling is not just inconvenience to innocent people, it is about duplicating what is embodied in racial profiling, increasing racism by enhancing alienation and eventually leading to the heightened crime rates that result from racial discrimination. The use of profiling is an out-dated practice because terrorists can adapt to methods used by law enforcement. Furthermore, if security personnel are mainly trained to racially profile for threats, they will not be experienced in identifying threats by studying behaviour.

If terrorism is to be stopped, intelligence agencies and security forces must be conscious of human nature and how the mind responds to certain treatment. Some intelligence analysts argue that racial profiling is only one portion of a complex profile, also including behaviour but none of the available security sources have actually given a clear definition. This is where the argument of a complex profile falls short. If the individuals who argue for the concept of a complex profile do not even know what it is, then it is simply void. The concept of a complex profile seems perfect but it is merely a mask for what is clearly racial profiling.

There are strong researches and statistic supports that speak of one common factor of previous terrorists, which is that many of them have a strong religious ideology background and the factor that made terrorist organisations lethal is when ethno-nationalism is combined with religion. In addition, common terrorist attack patterns are formed by studying past attacks, so intelligence agencies can come up with a specific set of counter-intelligence strategies to put a stop to those terrorism methods.

Racial profiling is a shortcut based on bias rather than evidence. I concur that there simply is no reliable terrorist profile and that the problem is the word profiling itself as it conjures up negative connotations. The fundamental task of profiling is to separate the terrorist from the non-terrorist. Effective profiling achieves distinction between these two groups and attempts to establish a set of psychological, socio-economic, physical and/or racial attributes that mark one from the other. In other words, what does a terrorist look like, what personality traits do they possess and in what circumstances do they live and work? Essentially, it constructs a terrorist profile comprised of certain perceptible qualities with which an observed individual can be likened to, thus determining the probability of terroristic tendencies within the subject. Without an accurate profile, the system can be statistically demonstrated to be no more effective than random screening. With gathering intelligence, analysing threats, looking at vulnerabilities and issuing real time alerts, only then can intelligence agencies provide management and oversight to security forces to perform the actual job.

The writer is a professor of Psychiatry and consultant Forensic Psychiatrist in the UK. He can be contacted at fawad_shifa@yahoo.com