AN ASSESSMENT OF THE INCLUSION OF PROFILING AS A TOOL IN AIRPORT SECURITY OPERATIONS: A RESEARCH PROPOSAL
Airport security is a broad term that can encompass activities as disparate as the prevention of petty theft to the minimization of to potential for the occurrence of terrorist incidents with a wide variety of important activities that fall between these polar extremes (Ghobrial & Irvin, 2004). Along this of continuum of significant aspects of airport security, the minimization of the potential for terrorist incidents is the most significant of all airport security activities (Turney, Bishop, & Fitzgerald, 2004; Karber, 2002).
There are many tools which have been incorporated into airport security operations or which have been proposed for such incorporation. Perhaps the most controversial of these tools is the process of profiling air travel passengers (Rice & Mullen, 2003). Strong arguments exist on each side of the issue of the use profiling as one of the tools of an airport security strategy (Reddick, 2004; Lund, 2003).
There are many different approaches to applying the profiling concept to identify persons of interest. A behavioral approach to profiling attempts to predict future behavior or behavioral intent based on (a) past actions, (b) current behavior (nervousness or furtiveness at an airport security checkpoint, as an example), or (c) a combination of the two. Profiling also can focus on traits to assess the probability that an individual will act in some specified way. Psychological profiling attempts to predict future behaviors based of a psychologically-focused assessment of that which is known about a person or based on a psychologically-focused assessment of that which can be inferred from evidence associated with the actions of an unknown person. This approach to profiling frequently is applied in searches for serial killers.
Demographically-focused and culturally-focused profiling attempts t...