Is Ethnic and other Profiling Discrimination? BECKER

The value of using group membership in judging unobserved characteristics is uncontroversial most of the time, and so is hardly noticed. For example, automobile insurance companies consider young unmarried males as a relevant group in determining driver insurance premiums because they tend to have more car accidents than older males or young women. These higher insurance rates also help cut down the number of auto accidents by reducing driving by accident-prone young males. Yet given that group membership is almost always an imperfect predictor of unobserved characteristics, some individuals will be treated much worse (or better) than their true characteristics justifies. In the driving case, young unmarried males who are careful and responsible drivers will pay more for insurance than they would in a world with better information. They might be discouraged from driving because they suffer from the bad driving of other young unmarried males. Still, limited information about individuals means that group identities is often useful in gaining information about them. However, the use of religious, racial, or ethnic characteristics for national security protection and in fighting crime has been a political hot potato, and has led to accusations of discrimination on the basis of race and other characteristics. For the use of group identities in order to treat different groups differently may be the result of a desire to discriminate against various minority groups instead of a desire to act effectively to prevent some undesirable actions. On top of the current agenda is the effort by organizations fighting terrorism to treat Muslim with greater suspicion. Is it justified to single out young Moslem males from the Middle East for much more careful searches at airports, or for tougher requirements to gain tourist visas and green cards? Or are employees at stores that are trying to prevent theft of their goods justified in watching minority customers more carefully than they watch others? Macy’s was recently fined for allegedly watching blacks and Hispanics more carefully, although the company denies that such profiling of customers is their policy. Efficient actions would say minimize the amount of terrorist activities in the US, given a limited amount to be spent on preventing terrorism, or would minimize store theft, given a budget for security personnel. Then security checks at airports would try to both catch terrorists before they board a plane, and to discourage future airport terrorism by raising the chances that they are caught at the airport. Similarly, store security both tries to apprehend thieves, and to discourage future store theft. If young Moslem Middle Eastern males were in fact much more likely to commit terrorism against U.S. than were other groups, putting them through tighter security clearance would reduce current airport terrorism. Whether such religious and ethnic profiling furthers the second goal, of deterring future terrorism, depends on the degree of responsiveness of different potential terrorists to a greater likelihood of being caught. If the degree of response by different groups were proportional to their average propensity to engage in terrorism, then checking young Moslem Middle Eastern males more carefully would also help deter future terrorism at airports. On the other hand, profiling by average propensities might be inefficient if the marginal propensity to reduce terrorism with more careful checks were smaller for groups like Moslems that might have higher average propensities. That could well be true if these groups were more fanatical and less easily deterred by the prospects of being caught. Then the “deterrent” effect on future terrorism would be opposite to and might be stronger than the “apprehension” effect on current terrorism. The deterrent effect is less likely to dominate the apprehension effect when the difference in average behavior is greater. This is why it is efficient to profile young male Middle Eastern Moslems for terrorist attacks at airports, and perhaps it is efficient also to watch minority shoppers more carefully at stores. To be sure, such profiling is “unfair” to the many young male Moslems who are not terrorists, and to the many minority shoppers who are honest. That could be made up in part by compensating groups who are forced to go through more careful airport screening through putting them in shorter security lines, or in other ways. Similarly, innocent shoppers who are stopped and searched could be compensated for their embarrassment and time. To be sure, some profiling by governments and the private sector has been due to prejudice against various groups, not as a way of achieving efficiency. So it is crucial to be able to distinguish whether a profiling is efficient from whether it is evidence of discrimination. This distinction can be made in the terrorist field (similar considerations apply to fighting crime) by keeping records on the fractions of young Moslem males and others who were searched and found with weapons or other evidence of intent to commit a terrorist act. If the fraction were much greater among Moslems searched than among others, this would at least be consistent with an emphasis on efficiency rather than discrimination. A further test would be to determine what happens to apprehension rates as the amount spent on airport security increased or decreased. The profiling policy would again be consistent with efficiency if greater spending on airport security reduced the apprehension rates of young male Moslems who were searched about as much as the apprehension rates of others. So it is possible to provide analytical criteria and guidelines to determine when particular types of profiling are explained by efficiency considerations rather than discrimination. By using these guidelines to analyze data on apprehension rates, one can determine in an objective manner whether discrimination rather than efficiency is responsible for different treatment of members of ethnic, religious, or racial groups.

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