Is Profiling on Planes, Trains, Buses, Etc. Making the Nation Safer?
It has been nearly 15 years since the tragic events of September 11, 2001. Still, we regularly hear reports of the excesses of racial and religious profiling in the name of security.
Last week, the Washington Post reported that a University of Pennsylvania economist, Guido Menzio, an immigrant from Italy, apparently fit a profile and was interrogated for doing math — yes, math — on an American Airlines flight.
The Texas Tribune reports that a Sikh advocacy group wants criminal charges to be filed against three people who restrained two fellow Greyhound bus passengers in Amarillo and called 911 to report them as terrorists. Daljeet Singh, an Indian asylum seeker bound for Indianapolis, left Phoenix, Arizona, on Feb. 20 on a Greyhound bus. On board, he met Mohammed Chotri, a Pakistani, and the two began speaking to each other in Punjabi. The fact that they were speaking a non-English language and spoke on cell phones, apparently provoked suspicions.
In April, a UC Berkeley student was escorted off a Southwest Airlines flight after speaking Arabic on the phone to his uncle.
Here are three other instances when innocent people were escorted off flights.
KJ