The Treyvon Martin murder trial will soon be over, but it touched a nerve in our country regarding the perplexing question of racial profiling in police work. Almost all of us want good policing and criminal justice systems in our nation so as to protect us from criminals. At the same time, we can only spend so much of our limited money and resources to support these systems. But more importantly, we want our systems to be color-blind, to treat all fairly regardless of race, religious views, sex and sexual preference, ethnic heritage, age, etc. We’d like to think this could all be done without any conflicts. But as the Feb. 26, 2012 incident in the Twin Lakes complex in Sanford, Florida showed, sometimes conflicts are inevitable. And most regrettably, they can be deadly.<\/p>\n
George Zimmerman, the volunteer community guard at Twin Lakes accused of murdering Treyvon Martin<\/a>, clearly was not acting in a fashion that was blind to color, age and sex on the night of Feb. 26. He decided to carry out an enhanced level of surveillance against the late Mr. Martin, based possibly on the fact that Mr. Martin was a young black man (17 years old). While Mr. Zimmerman did not appear to interfere with Mr. Martin’s passage, he certainly did follow him, and called the municipal police requesting them to join in his surveillance effort. This certainly was an intrusion into Mr. Martin’s privacy and quality of life; very few of us would want to be followed and continually monitored by law-enforcement officials, even when outside of our homes. This treatment certainly was the fruit of profiling on Mr. Zimmerman’s part, which almost certainly did include consideration of Mr. Martin’s race.<\/p>\n The question is, can such irritating law enforcement action based on a profile-matching logic be justified by the circumstances? The housing complex where Mr. Zimmerman lived and volunteered to guard had over the past year experienced an increasing and troubling level of home break-ins and theft incidents. Some residents felt that the perpetrators<\/a> of these incidents were often young black males. One African-American woman who lived in the Twin Lakes complex (but refused to give her name for fear of backlash) was quoted in the press as saying “I’m black, OK? There were black boys robbing houses in this neighborhood. That’s why George was suspicious of Trayvon Martin.” <\/p>\n I cannot answer this question here. It is extremely complex and can only be legitimately resolved over time through a social and political dialectic process. As with the homeland security laws and surveillance systems that were instituted after the attack on Sept 11, 2001, we know that the maintenance of public safety often involves compromised levels of privacy and public comfort. The press has identified many examples of this; for example, if you are an active photographer, you know that you can’t take certain public-area photographs<\/a> without on-going police interference as you could before 9-11. (Try walking down a public street with a camera near an oil refinery or a major mass transit junction or a power station and start pointing your camera around; see how long it takes for a police car to pull up and ask for your identification and an explanation of your activities). And anyone who flew on an airline before 2001 and after also knows darn well what ‘security burden’ is about. Edward Snowden’s revelations of NSA surveillance of public communications recently nailed home the point, as if any more nailing were needed. <\/p>\n Let me make three observations about profiling and public security. First, although “profiling” seems so terribly unfair, irrational and inhumane, every one of us does it, over and over. Whenever you take a job interview, someone is judging whether you would fit in with their workplace and be a good worker, based on a multitude of personal observations. The interviewer is profiling you based on her or his past experiences with various workers who were and were not beneficial to their organization. (And as another arena for sub-conscious profiling, have you even been out on a blind date?) <\/p>\n Is all of this fair? Suppose your hair looked a bit like someone who was a troublesome employee (or someone your blind date once broke up with), and you have some tics or nervous habits that remind the interviewer (or your date) of that person. You probably aren’t going to get the job (or the romance), although the interviewer will never honestly admit as to what turned their minds against you. You may have been a great employee (or lover) despite your messy hair and tics, but too bad, because the hiring authority just didn’t feel that you would be comfortable with this opportunity. I have been on both sides of this process in my life, and I am convinced that this sort of thing is quite common.<\/p>\n Second, there is a well-respected management decision theory that in a way explains profiling. It is called the Theory of Bayes, or Bayesian decision-making. I’m not a management theory guru, but in a nutshell, the Bayesian inference process<\/a> starts when you are faced with a decision about something that you don’t have enough information about. What you do is make a guess based on whatever associations and clues that you might actually have (and NOT about what you DON’T have; this sounds trite, but too many people focus on the fact that Treyvon Martin had Skittles and iced tea, and not a gun or a crowbar; but George Zimmerman could NOT have known that on the night in question). You come up with a probability estimate that is NOT specific to the subject in question (e.g., the break-in threat from a Treyvon Martin walking across the condo complex at night, or the chances that an unknown applicant for a job will make a good employee), but instead uses clues from certain characteristics that you can observe about the subject. Later on, you hopefully gain more experience and information with the subject in question and you modify your probability estimates based on actual experience. But you do have to start somewhere, so you have to make that subjective estimate for the initial decision.<\/p>\n Third, it appears to me that a lot of people decided very quickly after the Feb. 26 incident that George Zimmerman had shot and killed Treyvon Martin solely because of his race, without any mitigating concern for his own personal survival (i.e., Zimmerman’s claim that Martin had attacked and subdued him and was threatening Zimmerman with possibly fatal injury). Throughout the trial over the past two weeks, I have read a number of articles by commentators who continue to espouse this point of view, see here<\/a> and here<\/a> and here<\/a> for examples (but a tip of my hat to former NPR analyst Juan Williams<\/a> for attempting to be fair to both sides). In my opinion, this was and clearly is itself a form of race-related profiling; ergo, when a young African-American is killed by a non-African-American law enforcement official, it must involve racial hatred on the part of that official. The question for discussion is, is this a form of rational or irrational profiling?<\/p>\n I myself find some of it rather irrational (although I certainly understand the emotions driven by the unending memories of a long, violent and shameful history of race relations in America, going back to the days of slavery and Jim Crow). I myself felt from the start that the Martin-Zimmerman case was quite complex, in need of a detailed investigation of all the circumstances. <\/p>\n