Profiling is how El Al Israel Airlines have not had even an attempted skyjacking since the Dawson's Field Incident. And even then, the captain, realizing he had a nefarious passenger on board, threw his plane into a steep dive to throw the intruders off balance. One of them broke his silly neck; a passenger cracked a bottle of liquor over the other one's head.

Since then, El Al always provide their own security for passenger screening. Nattily dressed, scrupulously polite security officers, all of them IDF veterans, grill every passenger to find out how they got to the airport, where they will go when they get there, etc., etc. I know: I flew El Al to Israel five years ago, as a tourist. I never felt safer in the air.

I profile people by the way they look and behave all the time. It's a survival technique.
In the wild I'm looking out for the lions, tigers and bears--oh my!
Chipmunks, squirrels and cuddly little bunny rabbits fail to trigger a threat response for some funny reason.

Dr. Williams is,as usual, right on the money.Most people in positions of responsibility might well profile people several times a day - mentally. Most people do it without thinking about it and that's where the trouble starts. It is easily shown that profiling often slides into prejudice so one should be careful to make sure the profile is valid.

It truly ridiculous that a common sense observation can be vilified. Taken to the extreme:

Officer: Can you describe the person that did this?
Victim: I was robbed by someone.
Officer: Can you describe the person?
Victim: err, human.

Sheer stupidity.

Aren't all efforts to correct racial, cultural, or gender bias a form of profiling? White males are automatically considered "privileged" in educational and government circles. When a minority gets special treatment regarding college admission or job consideration, isn't that a form of profiling that automatically tags them as inherently inferior?

Any time we set different standards for males and females, we're profiling. The stupidest difference I saw during the Carter era, when the Army was ordered to reduce the distance a woman had to throw a grenade from 15 yards to 10 yards. After a general pointed out that the lethal range of grenade shrapnel was just under 15 yards, the order was quickly withdrawn.

Everyone profiles all the time. The only time anyone complains about it is when it bothers someone on the Left.

You will never hear anyone on the Left complaining about the way that they profile gun owners or anyone else on the Right.

I totally agree with this. It is not black and white. It is far more.
How many people, women or men, would be afraid of a ride on an empty bus at midnight with an attractive, well dressed thirty-something black woman. Compare this to riding the same bus with a 240 lb, 6'4" twenty-something, scruffy, tattooed white man.

This profiling nonsense has gone too far. We are trying to weed out survival traits in favor of political correctness, and if fully implemented, just about everyone would suffer.

The best path forward is to eliminate the boundaries by data. Gandhi and Mandela showed a means to address this, without asserting that behaving as a hoodlum and demanding one's status was the new cultural norm. How about behaving like the people that succeed, and setting a cultural norm around success?

If you are profiling against someone because of their race that is morally wrong and allowable under liberty. I would not support a business if it isolated or refused customers based on their race or ideology however if they profiled against bullies and thieves (which would mean most of congress would not be allowed in) I would prefer that business and use it.

Collective profiling is a failure to think. The essay by Walter Williams' Town Hall blog article is loaded with errors.

(1) First of all, I have worked in trucking and in household moving. Size and strength are irrelevant. Care for your work is primary. And no one works alone. You always team up for anything not obviously (trivially) a one-person load.

(2) Just because I am "White" by appearance does not mean that I am not at risk for any number of other health problems. It would be a failure for a doctor to ignore potential problems based on her assessment of my apparent "race" -- because no genetic markers exist for "race."
What would your medical prognosis be for this girl?
https://www.sciencenews.org/sites/def...
The article does not mention that by any "genetic" test for "race" she is Asian, even though she looks African. So, if she walked into a clinic here in Austin, Texas, should she be "profiled" before she is examined and treated?
As for my "whiteness" I have B-positive blood, more "typical" of west Asians (see here http://anthro.palomar.edu/vary/vary_3... ). So, what profiling would be appropriate for me in the doctor's office?

(3) The fact that the incidence of Black men in US prisons is twice the incidence of African-Americans in the general population (https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/... ) is a consequence of racial profiling in the US criminal justice system.

(4) That brings up the problem from Dr. Williams' Town Hall essay of criminal profiling. With the exception of female burglars, most "street criminals" prey on their own neighborhoods. If the thefts occurred near a senior home, I would look there first before I went into the inner city to roust out young Black men on the theory of profiling.

(5) On that note, there was a "libertarian realist" i.e., racist, using the name Brad Thun who visited some "Objectivish" boards. He asked this, rhetorically: If you were in an inner city alley at night and you saw someone coming, would you be more afraid of a young Black male or an old white woman. One of the "profilers" took the bait. However, I pointed out that a young Black male belongs in the alley - heck, the kid's probably coming home from the library - but the old white woman is the odd event, and more likely to be a danger. ... and no asked, "Why am I in an inner city alley at night?"

At the David Ben-Gurion Airport, the security officers do not care if you are an Arab or a Jew or a Buddhist; Black or White or Green; male, female, or gayly transgendered. They want to know if you are evasive.

I mentioned this before: my degrees are in criminology. Most people only know a "mass mediated hyper-reality" of crime in which the Internet and television play back for us what they believe our expectations to be. More people are afraid of Hannibal Lecter than they are of Dean Daniels, William Bradley, or Billy Johnston. (See here: https://www.epa.gov/enforcement/2015-... )

("Mass mediated hyper reality of crime" on my blog here: http://csiflint2011.blogspot.com/2011... )

Moreover, we often know the names of corporations but not the names of the actual individuals who commit mass crimes. (See for example here; https://cfpub.epa.gov/compliance/crim... ) That said, it would be wrong to profile corporations as statistically likely to be criminals.

I don't think it should be a "dirty" word, but it's usually not smart. In most of the cases, they're actually examples of areas where grouping people confuses the issue. It says men have better distance vision, but an eye chart would be a much more reliable way to identify people with good eyesight. For unloading furniture, it presents the false choice of a complicated strength test vs grouping by sex, skipping the obvious choice of looking at their size, age, and physique. In the law enforcement example, if criminals find out the profile they'll recruit members of groups where criminals are under-represented.

Focusing on groups comes at the expense of not focusing as much on individuals. We are adapted to group people and fear people outside our group, a trait beneficial to hunter/gatherer bands with no legal system, but in the modern world it's a horrible trait because a lot of human progress comes from people doing things different, not following the group.

In most cases, including most of the examples in the article, I say focusing on group identities is not smart.