Racial Profiling in Airports

RACIAL PROFILNG IN AIRPORT

                Traveling has become popular and with the advancement in technology, it has become easier to get from one place to another.  One of the most common ways to get across the nation or the continents is via airplanes. More and more people are using airports as a method to get to areas where it’s nearly impossible to go to. Ever since 9/11 safety has become a great concern for the government and since airports were never really targeted until 9/11 security wasn’t that big of a concern.

Today, terrorism faces worldwide attention, and it is assumed that terrorists who wish to harm the United States are concentrated in the Middle East or in countries with a predominate Muslim population such as Indonesia. The United States government has begun to develop strategies for detecting and apprehending terrorists. One of the most popular methods is racial profiling, which uses race and ethnicity as the main principles for detaining or stopping suspects. Some of the things that the federal government begun doing is “random” stopping of people based on how they look or are dressed. The "random" stopping of people before and after they board a plane not only violates that person's personal rights, but it creates an artificially induced hatred to a particular group of people as well as demonstrates the overall ignorance associated with racism.

The New York Times authors Michael S. Schmidt and Eric Lichtblau wrote an article called “Racial Profiling Rife at Airport, U.S. Officers Say” in which they state that “In interviews and internal complaints, officers from the Transportation Security Administration’s “behavior detection” program at Logan International Airport in Boston asserted that passengers who fit certain profiles — Hispanics traveling to Miami, for instance, or blacks wearing baseball caps backward — are much more likely to be stopped, searched and questioned for “suspicious” behavior.”  This “behavior detection” program has become more of racial profiling according to the agents working for TSA. This became so much of a problem to where even the Massachusetts State Police officials began questioning why there are high numbers of minorities cases being referred to them. 

Racial profiling is the law-enforcement practice of singling out members of racial minorities as suspects. Heavily practiced in airports today, this procedure does much more harm than good. In suspecting Arabs or other minorities solely for the fact that they are of a different ethnic background strongly violates what our country stands for. Arabs and other minorities who once saw the United States as a place of freedom and equal opportunity now experience firsthand the true injustices it furnishes.

The singling out members of the minorities as possible suspects by the law enforcement is racial profiling and it is a practice that is being commonly used throughout the nation by many different law enforcement agencies. It does not just affect the Muslims but it affects anyone that falls under the minority groups such as Hispanics and African-Americans. The minorities who once saw the United States a place of freedom and equal opportunity, no longer see it because they are victims of the system that in-justly labels them as possible criminals or terrorists.  The United States has a large minority’s population and the question of whether the federal government should take race into account as the main factor when profiling for possible terrorists requires a balancing of moral, legal, equality, and liberty values, all values which our country was founded upon.

 

 

 

 

 

CITATIONS:

Lichtblau, Michael S. Schmidt and Eric. "Racial Profiling Rife at Airport, U.S. Officers Say." The New York Times. The New York Times, 12 Aug. 2012. Web. 28 Sept. 2012. <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/us/racial-profiling-at-boston-airport-officials-say.html?pagewanted=all>.