Profiling, Threat Assessement, and Prejudice

On February 6th, 2015, a Madison, Alabama police officer assaulted 56 year old Sureshbhai Patel, an Indian National visiting the country to help care for his grandson.  One week after his arrival at the home of his son – Chirag Patel, an Engineer – he was taking a walk around the block, when a neighbour phoned 911 to report what he considered suspicious behaviour.  Shortly thereafter the police arrived to confront the elder Patel, who did not speak English, but offered no resistance to the officers.  Seemingly without provocation, Officer Eric Parker slammed him into the ground, resulting in hospitalization and partial paralysis of the grandfather.  Parker has since turned himself in on charges of assault in the third degree.

In stark contrasts to the cases of Eric Gardner and Michael Brown, there was no illegal behaviour occurring; Patel does not appear to have acted aggressively when confronted by the Officers; nor did he appear to offer any resistance.  It appears to be utterly one-sided.  Further information, including the video tape of the incident as well as the audio of the 911 call can be found at AL.com – H/T RooshVForum.

This incident brings up issues of profiling, threat assessment, and prejudice, which bear exploring.

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In a previous life I was military, and I worked closely with many others in the law enforcement industry.  There’s a human element present in the martial professions which simply cannot be captured in books on strategy, video game combat simulations, or the toned-down conflict of corporate warfare.  The closest you can come to it are the books on leadership – almost invariably written by ex-military personnel, and almost invariably consumed by those in the corporate world.  The lethality and unpredictability of violence grants a terrifying insight into human nature.

I suspect that soldiers have the easiest time of it, despite suffering the highest casualty rate and bearing witness to the most horrific consequences of it.  They also have the greatest insight into it.  They see the full extent of violence, but have the freedom to examine it in depth during lulls in the battle (“Months of boredom punctuated by moments of extreme terror,” as the saying goes).  A soldier knows who his enemy is (even if they refuse to wear uniforms), and the conditions where lethal violence is authorized are extremely clear.  Threat assessment is a simple matter; anybody who isn’t wearing a NATO uniform who moves in a squirrely manner is a potential enemy.¹

For police the danger is ever-present, but far less distinct; those who point out that policing is one of the safest jobs in America are utterly missing the point.  A police officer is tasked with arresting criminals, but also with helping civilians.  99% of an officer’s job is protecting the public from itself, through the enforcement of all of those ‘petty’ regulations which are required for a civil society to operate – nipping conflict in the bud, addressing a property infraction before it turns into violence, or apprehending somebody under the throes of a psychotic episode.  During moments like these the officer is confronting their fellow citizens, their friends, and (ultimately) their pay masters; civility and decorum are mandatory.  But then there’s the other 1% of the time when they’re dealing with the antisocial criminal; not merely someone who’s violating a particular rule they find disagreeable (“I can’t drive fifty-five!”) but somebody who’s in open rebellion to the whole concept of rules in the first place.  Very few officers ever have to fire their sidearm in anger, but every day… they might.

Prison Guards have the worst of it, if you ask me.  Tasked with taking ensuring the welfare of a bunch of unruly moral simpletons, who viciously resent the guard for their confinement.  One of the men I worked with was a retired prison guard.  He once told me of an observation his wife had made: that it wasn’t until 6 years after his retirement from the prison that his eyes stopped their constant scan for threats in his immediate environment.  He still performed a near-instantaneous threat-assessment of every individual he encountered, but he was no longer searching for that hidden shiv that had his name on it.

Any attempt to discuss the realities of profiling, threat assessment, and prejudice – whether it be based upon race, wardrobe, or religion – is going to utterly miss the point.  To the outside (civilian) observer profiling and racism will look like the same thing, when nothing could be further from the truth; and any attempts to prevent the latter will only hamper police officers in the execution of their duty, resulting – ironically – in even more of the violent clashes they were attempting to prevent, as well as providing fertile ground for the growth of prejudice, which leaves everybody worse off.

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Threat assessment is a skill that everybody in the law enforcement industry learns to one degree or another.  It’s a constant vigilance bordering on paranoia, where the back of your mind never stops examining the environment for any aberrations, even while your conscious mind is focused elsewhere.  You will be alerted to the presence of people or animals, even at great distance, and incongruities in sounds or patterns will be flagged for your consideration.  One of my old Sergeant Majors described it as ‘Situational Awareness’.

It’s largely a subconscious thing; an instinct which, for me at least, carries over into driving.  I’ll frequently be alerted to another driver on the road for no obvious reason, only to have them pull some sort of dangerous stunt moments thereafter (I’ve avoided three or four major accidents in my life thanks to this).  I’m also quite adept at spotting cops in my rear-view mirror – not because of the model of car they’re driving (often it will be too far out of view for me to discern), but because of how they’re driving.  It’s usually a subtle thing, this instinct, but one incident in particular from my life appeared downright prescient to the company I was with.

I was at the Doors Pub in Hamilton some years back, sharing a pitcher with a female acquaintance of mine.  We were in the upstairs area, which was subdivided into two rooms; ours was separated by a closed door which opened onto a landing next to a stairwell, while the other was adjacent to the landing, and had a couple of pool tables in it (if you’ve read my novel As I Walk These Broken Roads, the bar I described at the beginning was essentially Door’s Pub; I loved that place).  We were the only two sitting in the closed off room, while in the pool room a rowdy crowd of young men was having fun.  Upon arrival I thought nothing of it, the two of us migrated to the quieter area for conversation.

We’d been sitting there for an hour or so when a major red flag went up in my mind.  I stopped mid-sentence in what I was saying, and told her “We’ve got to go.” I grabbed her by the arm and dragged her out of there, despite her protests over abandoning our beers (something I’m normally loathe to do).  As we moved towards the stairs I realized what had set me off; the rowdy young men had suddenly gone silent.  Halfway down to the main level, violence erupted behind us, the group seemed to be having some sort of gang-fight, but we were already gone.

If I had been sitting there with one of my male friends I might have stayed to provide some sort of order, or at least first aid for any of the wounded, but as it was I was tasked with the protection of the skinny waif I was with; too many things to go wrong in that situation.  Getting out of there was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life.

Occasionally a honed instinct for situational threats will provide a warning of clear and present danger like the above, but most of the time it’s far more subtle; a constant stream of ‘Yellow Alerts’ which require conscious analysis.  This is where the line between profiling and prejudice begins.  Profiling is necessary, a necessary evil even – it’s inherent to the whole process – but allowing it to turn into prejudice is not just morally wrong, it’s bad threat assessment.

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To understand profiling (and to implement it correctly) you have to understand heuristics.  Heuristics are ontological systems which not only produce answers out of raw data, but also define what sort of data is relevant, and what sort of data is ignored.  A bad heuristic is the essence of the programmer’s saying “Garbage in, garbage out”.

Pure, unfiltered data is overwhelming and ultimately meaningless.  It’s the equivalent of 10,000 punch cards, without a machine to interpret the cards and create a program.  For the data to mean anything it has to be filtered – accurately!

When your mind is receiving a constant stream of ‘Yellow Alerts’ it is critical that you can parse this information quickly and efficiently.  This is where uncomfortable truths run into the postmodern feely-good liberal agenda: men are roughly 8x as violent as women – and Black men are roughly 8x as violent as White men (Source: The Color of Crime report, based upon FBI statistics).²  When you’ve trained your entire life to assess the threat of every individual you meet – as individuals – these demographic realities cannot be ignored.

Your threat radar is going to detect men over women, and Black men over White men – but this is only one piece of data.  If you stop there, you’re doing it wrong.

Race is a significant piece of information, but not the only one; style of dress, movement, facial expressions, a myriad of other factors need to come into play before you’re done.  Furthermore there are second-level iterations of these demographic realities that need to be considered.  Because there is more violence in Black communities, those who are raised there will have more experience dealing with violence, even though they themselves are not violent: that is to say, they are more likely to have the bearing of warriors.

There is a certain subset in law enforcement who are – in my estimation – cowards.  They only feel secure when they are the sheepdog surrounded by sheep; other sheepdogs make them feel nervous.  Those with a warrior bearing exude confidence and controlled violence, but not danger.  An accurate threat assessment will immediately take note of them – they are potentially violent after all – but it will also relegate them to the role of ‘potential ally’.  As I noted above, I am very aware of any police officers who happen to be in my vicinity… and while it varies from department to department, I’m happy to say that, more often than not, ‘potential ally’ is the category where I place them.

Nonetheless, a non-uniformed sheepdog is a curiosity in a society that gets more sheepish by the day.  And while I have the luxury of avoiding them and keeping my distance, police officers do not.  It’s their duty to be vigilant and to try and stop trouble before it begins.  If you stand out for any reason – whether it be the vehicle that you’re driving, your style of dress, the fact that you’re open-carrying, or even your race – you will attract attention from those who are tasked as society’s guardians.  This is not prejudice on their part; it’s just them doing their job.

Prejudice is what happens when you mix in a dose of hate and fear.

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As noted above, non-uniformed sheep-dogs (whether they be good men from a bad part of town, ex-military personnel, or a mixed martial arts instructor) project potential violence, but not danger: it’s the criminals who project danger.

Time was, any cop worth his salt could recognize criminals at a glance.  There’s a furtiveness in their laconic stroll, a casual irreverence in their speech.  There is often an air of guilt and hostility to them.  To a finely-tuned threat assessment instinct, it’s the former attributes that get noticed; to the poorly-trained, it’s the hostility that stands out.  This is where the problems begin.

For a variety of reasons, we are living in a low-trust society, particularly in regards to the police.  Partly through bureaucratic over-reach, and partly through a false media narrative, the public is trusting the police less and less, while simultaneously demanding that they do more and more.  The criminals were always hostile; now many of the sheep-dogs are as well.

For the past thirty years police profiling has been a cause célèbre, supported by two very different groups: on the one side you have the sheepdogs who are sick of being harassed – this group is composed of (primarily White) Libertarians as well as leaders in the Black community who are justifiably upset.  On the other side you have the liberal sheep, who simply want to shout “Racism!” and enjoy hampering the protectors they so desperately need.  While I am sympathetic to the two former groups, they are being destructively naive.

Policing may be rather safe in the technical sense, but in the day-to-day practical sense, a police officer is taking his life into his hands every time he puts on the uniform.  Developing an accurate threat matrix is one of his defences, and profiling is a critical aspect of assessing the world around him.  Take this away, and you don’t eliminate prejudice – you merely ensure prejudice against the wrong people.

Profiling – despite what many claim – is the essence of treating people like individuals.  It is through the application of multiple generalizations that we come to understand someone.  How they stand – what they’re wearing – what sort of accent they have – what sort of vehicle they drive – where they live – where they grew up.  Each and every one of these is a profile you apply to them, to isolate what sort of person they really are.  Prejudice is assuming everything about a person regardless of all evidence to the contrary; prejudice is why grandma gets patted down by the TSA.

When you treat people like individuals you are going to get unequal treatment on the demographic level – no matter how you slice it.  Race, sex, income, hair colour, whether you drive stick or automatic – because people are individuals with aggregate similarities, there will be aggregate differences in how these groups are treated, however you choose to define them.

In the case of Mr Patel and Officer Parker, there was no profiling at all.  Patel should have been profiled as an older man; as a skinny, non-violent person; as a foreigner who was confused and nervous; possibly even as a Hindoo, a man whose people had suffered centuries of Islamic terrorism.

Instead he was prejudiced as a threat because of a 911 call.

When society hates the police, not just as individuals, but institutionally, enforcing hateful standards upon them which prevent them from doing their jobs, what did you think the result was going to be – Officer Friendly?

Garbage in, garbage out, after all.  That’s the funny thing about Democracy: we get precisely the government we deserve.

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1. The idiocy of “Peace Keeping” not withstanding.  Soldiers are trained to kill people and save lives – not to keep the peace.  But that’s an argument for another time.

2. It should also be noted that while Black men are more violent, they are also extremely unlikely to be violent.  Only 1 out of 9 Black men between the ages of 20-34 (the peak crime years) is incarcerated, and the vast majority of those incarcerations are due to non-violent drug offences; for instance, there is a legal bias between crack-cocaine and cocaine of 100:1 (10 grams of the former is prosecuted as a kilo of the latter), which largely breaks down along race lines, disproportionately affecting Blacks.