NY Legislation Would Allow Profiling Of Arabs

It's interesting when a Democrat introduces legislation allowing racial profiling of Arabs in New York during bag searches, and then have the police call it illegal, ineffective, and against police policy.

I generally don't believe in profiling. It's intellectually lazy and a poor substitute for observation and deduction. It may be reasonable to add it to the arsenal, but it should never be the ovverriding determinant on whom to search. But in real life, I'd check every bag that looked like it could have a bomb in it. Barring that, random searches of bags that look like they could have bombs in them.

UPDATE: Myopic Zeal (in the comments section) points out that profiling is simply using past data in making a general picture of a situation or type of person, and is the result of observation and deduction. True enough, but racial or ethnic characteristics shouldn't be the end all and be all. It should be on equal footing with any other tool at our disposal (that guy's sweating a lot and looking nervous) and cannot be the predominant one.