Guilty by Suspicion.

“Officers are told to look for individuals who wear bulky clothing in the summer, pace back and forth, fidget with something beneath their clothing, fail to make eye contact, wear too much cologne, or have strange hair coloring. The indicators are also contradictory and inconsistent. Officers are told, for example, to look for individuals who are nervous and individuals who are calm, individuals who are overtly Muslim (those who mumble as if praying or who wear scented water for “ritual purification”) and individuals who seem to hide their Muslim identity so as to blend in. In sum, the guidelines are meaningless to officers who only have a few seconds to decide whether an individual constitutes a real threat before deploying lethal force.” A new report by NYU’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice finds suspect racial profiling at work in police anti-terror initiatives that can — and does — lead to fatal error. “The identification of suspects cannot be based on confusing indicators, or on the assumption that all Muslims, or those perceived to be Muslim, are potentially terrorists…If people can be shot on the basis of these assumptions, mistakes are bound to be made.“