Cato Daily Dispatch for October 03, 2001
Is Racial Profiling Justified?Putin Softens On NATO Expansion
Hoosier Flag Burner Jailed
Is Racial Profiling Justified?
Fearful that Americans are willing to exchange some of their civil liberties for increased security, civil rights activists foresee increased difficulties in combating racial profiling, according to The Miami Herald.
"The rules are changing. Where [profiling] may have been against blacks or Hispanics, it's changed to Arabs or Middle Easterners," said Geoffrey Alpert, a sociologist directing an antiprofiling survey for the Miami-Dade County Police Department.
Alpert's study was launched earlier this year amid complaints by activists that some officers and specialty patrols stop citizens solely on the basis of their color or ethnicity. Researchers are collecting information from traffic stops to see if minorities are being stopped at a disproportionate rate.
Hot lines set up by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights have been flooded with complaints by Muslims and other Middle Easterners that they have become targets of harassment, either by neighbors or employers, or at airports, solely on the basis of their appearance. Because of the volume of calls, a second hot line was added.
Profiling might help to combat terrorism, but it could also involve a massive infringement of civil liberties. Finding the balance requires an analytical framework that isn't based on seat-of-the-pants speculation, says Cato scholar Robert Levy in "Ethnic Profiling: A Rational And Moral Framework."
Putin Softens On NATO Expansion
President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that Russia would reconsider its opposition to further NATO expansion if Moscow were more involved in the process, according to Reuters.
Russia has until now been fiercely opposed to the inclusion of the three former Soviet Baltic states in the 19-nation Western alliance when NATO considers its next wave of enlargement next year.
"As for NATO expansion, one can take another, an entirely new look at this...if NATO takes on a different shade and is becoming a political organization. Of course we would reconsider our position with regard to such expansion if we were to feel involved in such processes," Putin told a joint news conference with European Union leaders.
In "NATO Expansion: Folly on Stilts," Ted Galen Carpenter warns against enlarging NATO hastily and writes that "advocates of expansion act as though NATO is a political honor society that the nations of Central and Eastern Europe are entitled to join because they have embraced democracy. But NATO is a military alliance, and the decision to extend U.S. security guarantees is serious business, not cost-free political symbolism. American troops might very well die defending those countries."
Carpenter is editor of the Cato Book "NATO Enlargement: Illusions and Reality."
Hoosier Flag Burner Jailed
An Indiana man accused of burning an American flag behind his home has been arrested, despite rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court that have said flag-burning is an exercise of free speech, according to the Associated Press.
David H. Stout, 49, of Noblesville was charged Monday with flag desecration and resisting law enforcement. He was being held Tuesday at the Hamilton County Jail on a $9,000 bond.
Stout was arrested Sunday after police found him lying beside a burning flag in an alley behind his home.
Indiana is among 48 states that still have a law against flag desecration on the books, even though the U.S. Supreme Court has twice said flag-burning is a constitutionally protected form of expression.
Stout told a neighbor who tried to stop the burning that he could burn his flag if he wanted. The neighbor called police.
Cato Vice President for Legal Affairs Roger Pilon testified before Congress on the proposed amendment and explained that "there is all the difference in the world between defending the right to desecrate the flag and defending flag desecration itself. It is the difference between a free and an unfree society."
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