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After a yearlong investigation, Amnesty International has released a report estimating that 32 million people in the US have been targets of racial profiling and 55 million more are at "high risk" of the same treatment. Amnesty defined the term as meaning detaining or questioning someone based on their race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion.

The international human-rights group backed its claim with a variety of sources - census data, polling information and interviews compiled over a year - and extrapolated some conclusions.

America's war on terrorism, the report says, has added a new level to profiling.

In the years since the Sept. 11 attacks, Muslims and people of Arab descent have joined blacks, Asians, Latinos and Native Americans most likely to be profiled by law enforcement and other authorities.

As Curt Goering, Senior Deputy Executive Director at Amnesty International USA, put it at the press conference announcing release of the report:

Racial profiling is to the 21st Century what Jim Crow laws were to the last, turning entire groups of people into second-class citizens and denying them the rights to which we all are due.

Today, "driving while black or brown" ... has been joined by "worshipping while Muslim," "walking while South Asian," "driving while Native American," and "flying while Middle Eastern."

Despite some huffy, self-interested claims to the contrary by law enforcement groups, the existence of such profiling is beyond question. Section 2 of the End Racial Profiling Act, introduced in Congress in February, noted that a 2001 DOJ report acknowledged that black and Hispanic drivers were more likely to be stopped and searched by police than white drivers. Even more pointedly, a 2000 General Accounting Office (now called the Government Accountability Office) report on the activities of the US Customs Service

found that black women who were United States citizens were 9 times more likely than white women who were United States citizens to be X-rayed after being frisked or patted down....

Tellingly, both reports revealed that the practice was counterproductive:

On average, searches and seizures of African-American drivers yielded evidence only eight percent of the time, searches and seizures of Hispanic drivers yielded evidence only 10 percent of the time, and searches and seizures of white drivers yielded evidence 17 percent of the time. ...

[O]n the basis of X-ray results, black women who were United States citizens were less than half as likely as white women who were United States citizens to be found carrying contraband. In general, the report found that the patterns used to select passengers for more intrusive searches resulted in women and minorities being selected at rates that were not consistent with the rates of finding contraband.

The fact that such practices persisted despite their obvious failures is proof enough that the reason behind it was straightforward bigotry. (In fairness, I need to mention that in 2000 the Customs Service switched from racial profiling to behavioral profiling - where the decision to search is based on how the particular person is acting rather than on what they look like. "Successful" searches tripled.)

Certainly, the racist basis on which the "war on terror" has been pursued has done no better. Goering, citing the 9/11 Commission, said

[i]nvestigations under the federal Absconder Apprehension Initiative of 6,000 people who were subject to final deportation orders led to 14 cases being referred to the FBI for further investigation relating to possible terrorist links - and not a single case was prosecuted. No individual scrutinized under the Visas Condor Program, which mandated additional security screening for certain visa applicants from 26 predominantly Muslim countries, has ever had his or her application rejected on the grounds of being a terrorist.

As Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) said,

Racial profiling gives an illusion of safety, that somehow if you question all those people that look like that, you will somehow find all the ones who are a threat to this country.

So racial profiling is an inefficient, racist, failure. A perfect policy for a post-9/11 world.

The End Racial Profiling Act now has 16 sponsors in the Senate and 96 in the House. I'd say that anyone who hinders this coming to a vote or votes against it if and when that happens is marking themselves as racist swine.

Links to the full text of the report, testimony, and related documents can be found here.