Police profiling is collectivist, un-American, unconstitutional, and ineffective.

What I detest about questions such as those on the profiles is that they don't give a very nuanced explanation (I.E. Since I am basically, as of writing this, a free-market anarchist, does 0% count as a flat tax?) But yes, we do seem to agree on great deal of things and have many of the same influences--Hayek, Rand, Milton Friedman and David Friedman among some of mine. I haven't read as much Von Mises or Ruthbard, but the little I know about them I like. So I'll try to explain what I mean by profiling and if the argument turns out to be a nit-picking of semantics, I'll just give one for a different view of profiling. Reply to 1: Profiling is based on probabilities. Being in a group does not make one less of an individual. For example, if I am in the republican party, that doesn't mean I am not an individual (well, maybe it does for that party, but that is another conversation), but it does increase the chance that I have done certain acts (like voting for republicans). So if you were trying to find people who voted republican, you would look mostly for republicans. Profiling isn't just used in tracking criminals. Medicine uses racial profiling to diagnose diseases. Some groups of people are more likely to have certain diseases over others. To say you can't know anything about a person just by what group they are in isn't exactly true. You can know certain probabilities. That's how marketing works, by looking at demographics and psychographics and determining which group of people is most likely to buy a certain product. So a marketer could use profiling and not believe in collectivism. It's that way in medicine, marketing, and criminal behavior. Serial killers are most likely to be white men. Since resources are limited, you can't screen everyone at the airport equally. And if you are trying to find terrorists, young muslim men with extensive traveling to the middle east are more likely to hijack a plane than a 5-foot 80 year old woman from Florida. It doesn't mean that all muslim men have to be searched, but if resources are a limitation, and a screening procedure is necessary for airline security, then it would make sense to not search as many old women as it does young muslim-arab men. Reply to 2 and 3: What was founded at America's beginning doesn't dictate right and wrong. Blacks were counted as 3/5ths as a person and women were not allowed to vote. America's individualism is sort of a work in progress. I haven't been able to search any court cases on profiling because for some reason Lexis Nexis isn't working. I'm not a constitutional scholar by any means, and I won't deny that profiling can be unconstitutional if used to convict people of crimes before they are committed. But I'm not sure searching one groups luggage more frequently than another's is crossing that line. Of-course, you could say that none of this would be needed if airlines would be put completely in charge of their own security and had guns on planes and I would say you were right. But I can side step all the constitutional stuff with this: Suppose I opened a completely private airline company "Daxitarian Airlines." Also, for security I contract "Daxitarian Security Services LLC." The security provided is based on a mathematical formula that takes into account several variables and uses it to determine how likely you are to be subjected to a random search (i.e. the probabilities that match up with each group have a terrorist in them correlate to the percentage of searches for a particular group.) To get on board you have to agree to take part in this lottery. Does this violate anyone's rights? So I don't know how exactly the constitution comes down on what government run security can do at airports, but private police profiling seems to be okay, and hence, my profile has police profiling as "agree." Reply to 4: It doesn't have to be perfectly effective, just more effective than what else is available. There are other screening technologies available that could be used to make the case as something more effective than police profiling is available (such as face recognition technology) but for the purposes of this conversation, I won't get into those. It has to be somewhat effective because profiling is used in a wide array of things from medicine to marketing. Gambling is a type of profiling because you are assessing what the odds are that certain events will occur in the future. Granted that there are some other non-arab muslims, but what is focused on is what groups of muslims want to kill us. I don't think terrorists are very multi-cultural. And the ones most actively trying to hurt us are mostly arab muslims from certain parts of the middle east. If it were the case that a statistically significant group of non-arab muslims were trying to hurt us, then those probabilities would be accounted for in the profiling. The attacks in Europe since 9/11 haven't been carried out by old white muslim women, but rather the same demographic that carried out 9/11. Anyway, police profiling isn't really a hot button issue for me, but in principal I'm not really against it, but I might change my profile.