Commentary: Applying Effective Security Measures Requires Profiling

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Applying Effective Security Measures Requires Profiling

By KATHLEEN PARKER

Like most Americans, I’ve been hesitant to get back on a commercial jet in the months following 9/11. But now, having flown the breadth and width of our great nation, I’m here to report that airport security has never been so intense or so absurd.

This I know with a rare certainty because I a smallish, middle-aged, Anglo-Saxon, 14th-generation American mother/wife/journalist was the single passenger culled from hundreds for surgical inspection on recent flights that took me from Charlotte, N.C., to Los Angeles to New York.

On each leg and at this writing I’ve still got one to dread I was swept, probed, partially stripped, searched, X-rayed, patted and massaged.

Now, don’t you feel safer? Not me.

I don’t feel any safer for two reasons. One, when I’m the object of so much time and attention, we’re clearly wasting finite resources. Two, it’s all too clear that one of the job requirements of our airport security force is a complete absence of common sense.

The reason I was singled out was a function of a computer decision. Because I was flying from Charlotte to L.A. to NYC, my flight wasn’t strictly round-trip. Ergo, I was a suspicious passenger. Add to that the fact that I had to switch airlines to meet my itinerary, from US Airways on one leg to United on the other. More red flags.

Finally, my ticket purchased by the television producers who were flying me to Los Angeles was reserved relatively recently. If they’d paid cash, I’d probably be in jail right now.

I won’t drag you through the whole tedious process. Suffice it to say that every particle of my being and my belongings were X-rayed, handled and examined. Not just once, but at least three times before I was allowed on the first plane. I had less trouble traveling to East Germany years ago before the Wall came down.

A little inconvenience for the sake of security is acceptable. But a lot of inconvenience when common sense could save so much time and energy is intolerable.

At some point during my processing, couldn’t someone have said, “Oh, Ms. Parker, you were flagged because of your three-way ticket. No problem, go ahead.”

But to permit common sense or actual thinking is to invite implications of racial profiling. It is to betray what John Derbyshire, writing in the National Review, called our “fanatical egalitarianism.” People like me have to be harassed in order to convey that we don’t single out anybody for special scrutiny on account of race or ethnicity, despite the fact that exactly zero percent of hijacking terrorists belong to my race, sex, creed or nationality.

Instead of applying logic and sense to our very serious security concerns, we engage in what amounts to reverse profiling, frittering away resources to prove a cultural point.

On the other hand, maybe we are safer on account of such witless waste. Thanks to me and other law-abiding Americans randomly selected for gulag examination, security folks can without guilt or recrimination flag the twentysomething young man of Middle-Eastern descent who perhaps has a bomb inside his electric toothbrush.

Kathleen Parker, a columnist with the Orlando Sentinel, can be reached at

[email protected].

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