Opponents of the practice of considering the race of terrorist suspects say that the gains made from targeting an ethnic group are not outweighed by the feeling of insecurity that innocent members of that group are subjected to. Some point out that Al-Qaida is a religious, not ethnic terrorist organization and therefore racial profiling not only can cause false charging of innocent people, but it can also allow non-Arab Muslims who belong to Al-Qaida or other terrorist groups to get away with terrorism. Some say that once Osama bin Laden realizes that we use racial profiling he'll make his top terrorists non-Arabs. .
The debate on racial profiling is also fuelled greatly by incidents that could hypothetically have been prevented had it been practiced to the extreme. For example, an extreme form of racial profiling towards Arabs could in theory have made authorities aware of those involved in September 11th before it happened, thereby preventing it. .
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In addition, some experts have also pointed to the fact that drug use and abuse, for example, is much more common among white suburbanites than urban blacks and Hispanics, yet police have most often targeted poor minorities for drug law enforcement; and there has been no public call to profile white suburbanites, despite this evidence (as this would likely be extremely unpopular among the white political majority). .
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In the United Kingdom in the early 1990s evidence showed that black people were as much as five times more likely to be stopped by the police. This is an example of racial profiling. Following this discovery, some police officers claimed that they were to frightened of being accused of racism to stop black suspects, and that the reaction against racial profiling had gone too far and was hindering their ability to do their job.
Supporters of racial profiling believe it to be a necessary tool for law enforcement because members of certain minority groups are, on pure statistics, more likely to commit certain types of crimes.