Muslim Profiles Post 9/11: Is Racial Profiling an Effective Counterterrorist Measure and Does It Violate the Right to Be Free from Discrimination?

Counter-terrorism Racial Profiling

In the aftermath of the London bombings in July 2005, Paul Sperry of the Hoover Institution, a well respected public policy institute at Stanford University, defended the police profiling of young Muslim men in New York City subways as a matter of simple common sense. Writing in the pages of the New York Times, Sperry argued that any future terrorist offender is likely to be young, male, and Muslim: “Young Muslim men bombed the London tube, and young Muslim men attacked New York with planes in 2001. From everything we know about the terrorists who may be taking aim at our transportation system, they are most likely to be young Muslim men.”