Cllr Matt Davis: Passenger security profiling

> Policy summary

To introduce security screening based upon passenger profiling at all UK airports and ports, including the Channel Tunnel links, in order to target security resources where they are best used and minimise the massive disruption and inconvenience currently being caused to air travellers.

> Policy explanation

One day last week the Matt cartoon in The Daily Telegraph showed a middle aged woman frisking her husband on the doorstep whilst telling him; “Someone’s been bringing dead birds into the house and it seems unfair to only check the cat.”  This seems to completely sum up the current government response to the most recent terrorist plot to blow up civil airliners, which is plainly based more upon political correctness than it is upon proven aviation security principles. As Baron Stevens, ex Metropolitan Police Commissioner John Stevens, recently and rightly pointed out in the News of the World:

“I'm a white 62-year-old 6ft 4ins suit-wearing ex-cop—I fly often, but do I really fit the profile of suicide bomber? Does the young mum with three tots? The gay couple, the rugby team, the middle-aged businessman? No. But they are all getting exactly the same treatment and devouring huge resources for no logical reason whatsoever.”

The unarguable fact is that Islamic terrorism in the West has been universally carried out by young Muslim men, mainly from ethnic minority backgrounds. However the present severely increased security procedures being enforced at our airports fail to take any account at all of this fact or to make proper use of the passenger screening techniques that have been proven time and again, especially by Israeli airlines, to work better than anything else at keeping flying safe for everyone.

As the Wall Street Journal recently said:

“A return to any kind of normalcy in travel is going to require that airport security do a better job of separating high-risk passengers from unlikely threats. However, the fact that we may have come within a whisker of losing 3,000 lives over the Atlantic still isn't preventing political correctness from getting in the way of smarter security."

As Conservatives we should be calling for the best possible use of resources allied to causing the minimum disruption to the maximum number of air travellers and that unquestionably must mean the introduction of passenger profiling.

> Political risks and opportunities

There is truly only one real political risk attached to this policy and that is, as Metropolitan Police Deputy Commissioner Tariq Ghaffur put it, that it would make a “crime of flying while Asian.". Therefore there is a genuine risk that we will be accused of some form of racism by the Muslim community, much of whom continue to remain in complete denial about the origin of the terrorist attacks in the UK. However this risk needs to be balanced against the reality that the terrorist attacks and plots are indeed being executed by British born Muslims and that they remain the most likely source of future attacks. This is a fact that has not passed the majority of British air travelers by and we will reap the rewards of telling the truth about this issue from a populace that is sick and tired of political correctness and double standards. It is of course essential that security screeners are also continually aware of the possibility of a non-Asian Muslim, perhaps a convert like Richard Reid, being the source of an attack.

On the positive side we would have better, more effective and efficient security at our airports and ports, far less disruption to the vast majority of ordinary travelers, and we would all feel much safer about traveling. These are outcomes that can be very easily contrasted with the Labour Government’s response, to show them up for the politically correct incompetents that we know them to be.

> Questions for ConservativeHome readers

• Is this policy really racist, or just common sense?
• Are we so desperate to secure Muslim votes that we ought to continue to allow much of that community to be in denial about the reality of Islamic Terrorism?
• Are you prepared to be considerably delayed and have your freedom to travel as you wish, and with what you wish, massively infringed upon simply to be “fair” in some nefarious way?

> Costs

This policy is in fact most likely to be financially positive since it will cut the unsustainable level of cost associated with the current all encompassing search routine as well as cutting the losses being sustained by the airlines as a result of both the security measures themselves and also by the loss of public confidence in air travel that leads to a drop in bookings. Not only that but passenger screening can be introduced at no cost whatsoever to the travelling public since it only needs a reallocation of existing resources and the political will to tell the truth about the threat that faces us.

Comments

[Yet Another Anon]

son of a former Conservative agent!
Patty Hearst who was abducted by the SLA (a radical Marxist revolutionary group in the USA) is the daughter of a major Newspaper tycoon and having been abducted she then joined the group, a lot of their members were Upper Middle Class Americans - the whole Che Guevarra thing, people such as Jane "Hanoi" Fonda suddenly becoming supporters of Revolutionary Marxism back in the 1960's and 1970's, there are some similarities in the cult of Osama Bin Laden and that of Che Guevarra in terms of imagery that could attract a lot of people who are either bored or feel a lack of meaning in life, in most of North America and Europe there has been a lot of undermining of the spiritual side of life and a creeping moral relativism that has left people without any reference points over decades now.

[Cardinal Pirelli]

One who's just been charged is called Brian!

[Eva]

In reply to Kevin Davis, Richard Reid was anything but normal looking ! He may have been white, but looked like a pantomime suicide bomber.

[Matt Davis]

A number of people seem not to understand how passenger profiling actually works. It is not just a case of targetting anyone with a Muslim or Asian name as some of you mistakenly wish to believe, it is a holistic system which also monitors the behaviour of all passengers from their arrival at an airport or port and takes account of various factors, other than just a persons apparent ethnicity or religion, and would have caught the likes of Richard Reid before he boarded a plane.

The parameters for Passenger Profiling are indeed set solely by the security professionals based upon their experience and knowledge of current threat sources and levels, unlike the Labour Government's current unsustainable system in which the parameters have been set by a politician for reasons of political correctness first and foremost.

[Neil Wilson]

Policy supported.

I can see why it would create negative feeling among the Muslim "community" but I'm really past caring. If the policy were to be implemented, Muslim "leaders" would start to blame the targeting of Muslim men for Islamic terrorism but, as we know, they are always looking for an excuse.

It makes no sense at all to stop and search those, such as elderly white women, who are obviously not going to commit any crime. Let's stop clogging up airports by getting people to sip their child's water and introduce profiling.

[Liam Murray]

Dangerous nonsense I'm afraid. Just because the tone of opposition is predictble make it no less valid. This isn't about shrieking political correctness or undue sensitivity towards UK Muslims, it's about real common sense and an awareness of what actually works.

(1) It would be months (perhaps weeks) before Islamic fundamentalists found a non-Asian sympathiser who would happily waltz through these measures.

(2) The policy itself would dramatically increase the size of the disaffected, radicalised Muslim youth movement who would be looking for the sort of person mentioned in (1)

and consequetly (3)- our actual security would massively undermined.

It looks like the battle for the soul of this party is far from over...

[Tired and emotional]

There may be the odd convert who falls outside of the holistic passenger profiling system described by someone above but that threat exists now anyway. Everyone needs to decide whether stopping mass-murder and the hamstringing of air travel in this country is important enough to upset the community of people responsible for that mass-murder and mass-inconvenience.

It shows just how far we, as a society, need to travel before we overcome our guilt complex that we are even debating this. Of course it is necessary, of course it will upset people. Tough. Why should we provide a level playing field, let's force them to adapt their tactics rather than reacting all the time. What a shock it would be to the fanatics if one of these decadent, supine Western societies took strong action.

There is also the prospect that UK Muslims might blame the inconvenience of the profiling on the people actually responsible for creating the need for it - the fanatics of political Islam.

[AAA]

It is hard to think of any proposal more hopelessly ineffective than this one. Anyone who has actually talked to people from an intelligence background, or even read any basic history of intelligence activities in NI knows this.

Luckily the intelligence services aren't so stupid as to do something like this. Covert profiling - deciding where to target intelligence resources - happens all the time. But the targeting of individuals can only be done on the basis of specific intelligence.

Still, I'm sure the author felt good getting this off his chest.