Profiling

Here is a fascinating article about profiling, and about how we make generalizations. Is profiling effective? Should we be doing it? Are there alternatives?

From Gladwell.com:
"Troublemakers"
http://www.gladwell.com/2006/2006_02_06_a_pitbull.html

It's a little longer read than many articles I post, but I think it's worth it. Here are a couple impressions from the article:

Raymond Kelly, New York City's police commissioner, knows his shit. Give guidelines and let people do their job. Don't micromanage. From the article:

"Before Kelly became the New York police commissioner, he served as the head of the U.S. Customs Service, and while he was there he overhauled the criteria that border-control officers use to identify and search suspected smugglers. There had been a list of forty-three suspicious traits. He replaced it with a list of six broad criteria. Is there something suspicious about their physical appearance? Are they nervous? Is there specific intelligence targeting this person? Does the drug-sniffing dog raise an alarm? Is there something amiss in their paperwork or explanations? Has contraband been found that implicates this person?

"You'll find nothing here about race or gender or ethnicity, and nothing here about expensive jewelry or deplaning at the middle or the end, or walking briskly or walking aimlessly. Kelly removed all the unstable generalizations, forcing customs officers to make generalizations about things that don't change from one day or one month to the next. Some percentage of smugglers will always be nervous, will always get their story wrong, and will always be caught by the dogs. That's why those kinds of inferences are more reliable than the ones based on whether smugglers are white or black, or carry one bag or two. After Kelly's reforms, the number of searches conducted by the Customs Service dropped by about seventy-five per cent, but the number of successful seizures improved by twenty-five per cent. The officers went from making fairly lousy decisions about smugglers to making pretty good ones. 'We made them more efficient and more effective at what they were doing,' Kelly said."


Another important point? Beagles (have I mentioned how much I love beagles before?) and bassets were specifically mentioned as NOT being represented as bad dogs. :) From the article:

"'I've seen virtually every breed involved in fatalities, including Pomeranians and everything else, except a beagle or a basset hound,' Randall Lockwood, a senior vice-president of the A.S.P.C.A. and one of the country's leading dogbite experts, told me."


Having said all that, I'm not sure I agree with the article's conclusion.

"It was a textbook dog-biting case: unneutered, ill-trained, charged-up dogs, with a history of aggression and an irresponsible owner, somehow get loose, and set upon a small child. The dogs had already passed through the animal bureaucracy of Ottawa, and the city could easily have prevented the second attack with the right kind of generalization—a generalization based not on breed but on the known and meaningful connection between dangerous dogs and negligent owners. But that would have required someone to track down Shridev Café, and check to see whether he had bought muzzles, and someone to send the dogs to be neutered after the first attack, and an animal-control law that insured that those whose dogs attack small children forfeit their right to have a dog. It would have required, that is, a more exacting set of generalizations to be more exactingly applied. It's always easier just to ban the breed."

Yes, the conditions were ripe for bad things to happen in the example given in the article. But do all that to other breeds and they don't kill. Pit bulls do. Simple as that.

Ironically, you can't make the generalization that generalization is always bad. :)