In the wake of last weekend’s New York City and New Jersey bombings, Donald Trump talked about “profiling.”
CNN jumped to the conclusion that he was “defending racial profiling,” but he did not say that. Rather, he did the policy equivalent of a name-drop, praising the way in which Israeli authorities use profiling.
One must surmise what Trump meant, or intended others to think he meant. But the drive-by reference to Israel points to something worth discussing in this era of frequent terrorist attacks in the United States.
Israeli authorities have mastered, in their long experience of terrorism, the identification of specific behavior patterns and simple mannerisms that habitually show up in people intending to commit acts of terrorism.
Given that the FBI has repeatedly mishandled advance warnings of specific people who turned out to be terrorist threats — at Fort Hood, in Boston, in Orlando and in New York City and New Jersey — it seems clear that they could be profiling more effectively. There is a gap that risk profiling must fill. Good intelligence and psychology can identify the telltale signs that a specific person merits closer observation.
Crude religious profiling of Muslims would not help. To be sure, law enforcement engages gently in this practice in a sense every time it reaches out to Muslim clerics for help identifying threats, which many of those clerics have admirably provided.
Profiling is useful when a specific kind of crime occurs repeatedly, in this case, terrorist acts coordinated with or inspired by the Islamic State or other Islamic terror groups. Criminologists and law enforcement develop profiles and study patterns of behavior in potential killers so as to be able to distinguish genuine threats from dead-ends.
Not only does there seem to a large gap in this regard, but there also seems to be unwelcome interference in the process by a politically correct ideology which would sooner see people die than open up investigations to accusations of bias against Muslims.
This is of specific concern given that complaints about the psychotic behavior of Omar Mateen, who murdered 49 in Orlando, were written off by the FBI as nothing but his coworkers’ racism.
Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, raised many red flags with his online habits, which by chance came into the hands of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. But according to a report released long after Nidal’s terrorist rampage, the FBI’s Washington Field Office failed to act on the information in part because it deemed the matter “politically sensitive.” As one official put it in conversation with a field officer in San Diego, the FBI “doesn’t go out and interview every Muslim guy who visits extremist websites,” apparently not even if he happens to be an officer in the U.S. military who is in contact with a foreign cleric known for his terrorist ideology.
When Ahmad Rahami’s father told authorities in 2014 that he feared his son was a terrorist, the bureau appears to have dropped the matter altogether when the father suddenly recanted this very potent accusation. Would a father say such a thing about his own son without any basis whatsoever? Was this really unworthy of any follow-up at all?
In these cases and others, there is much the public does not know, and that is by investigative design. There were probably warning signs that law enforcement is already studying in secret for use in future cases. If not, they should be. They need to pay more attention to how terrorists behave, and obviously set aside counterproductive ideas about political correctness, if they are to be more effective in stopping the next killer.
In several of these cases there may have been specific details about the suspects’ travel habits (beyond just the basics) that warrant special attention beyond and extra interview upon their return to the U.S. Another thing that recent terrorist attackers seem to have in common, in hindsight, is a sudden change in behavior that is noticed by friends and family. Both Mateen and Rahami have been described as carefree and irreligious individuals who suddenly became unrecognizably serious.
Law enforcement officials in the U.S. have a very difficult job. It is unreasonable to think that they can prevent every attack. But with so many successful attacks occurring despite advance notice that the perpetrators were threats, there is clearly something wrong with how they are following up on tips from the public. “See something, say something” only works when the people being told have a good follow-up plan.
