Never Trust an Unreleased Study

Citing a federally conducted and unreleased study, the Department of Homeland Security has claimed to have found no evidence of racial profiling at Boston’s Logan Airport. But the study remains undisclosed, and all it currently proves is that there is no reliable data on racial profiling in airports. The Department of Homeland Security should publicly release its study, the Transportation Security Administration should keep records of every detention it makes and be able to justify those detentions, and no detention should ever be made based on race or ethnicity.

According to the DHS, the study was conducted after allegations surfaced last summer that Logan was the site of egregious racial profiling. In conducting the study, a federal watchdog interviewed 84 TSA employees and reported that only one described an instance of racial profiling.

This conclusion is inherently suspect despite its laudable appearance. The study is faulty primarily because it is partial.

Furthermore, the TSA fails to keep data on travelers’ races, which the American Civil Liberties Union has noted makes it nearly impossible to know if certain racial or ethnic groups are unduly targeted.

Crucially, DHS’s study itself remains unreleased—meaning that concerned citizens cannot draw their own conclusions from the data. Instead, they have to rely on the government’s statements.

In order to better understand the phenomenon of racial profiling such that it may be eliminated, the TSA should keep detailed records of every single detainment, and it should be able to justify any one of those detainments without relying on race or ethnicity. Statistical summaries of those records should be available to the public, as should be any study conducted by government and related to racial profiling. If the government truly wants a clear picture of the prevalence of racial profiling in Logan or in any airport, it should use better methods than those it appears to have used: A random sample of passengers should be sampled so that the study’s results will be less prone to bias. Until measures such as these are taken, we cannot truly know whether racial profiling is prevalent in our airports—we cannot trust the DHS when it refuses to even publish its study.

Understanding the prevalence of racial profiling in our airports is of paramount importance because the practice itself is anathema to both liberty and equality. Benjamin Franklin said that those who are willing to sacrifice liberty for the sake of security in fact deserve neither. No person should be denied equal treatment under the law based solely on the color of his or her skin—even if security may be gained from the practice. Racial profiling must be abolished wherever it occurs.