Antiterrorist Policing in New York City after 9/11: Comparing Perspectives on a Complex Process

Human Organization, Spring 2005 by Bornstein, Avram

While hijacked airplanes and suicide bombings are fictional dramatizations of real events, the terrorist is usually the only image of Arabs or Muslims that American audiences see. For anyone ignorant to the diversity of Muslims and Arabs, the unsavory types portrayed could easily have been understood as generalized characteristics of many of those in the group. When such images remain unchallenged, the attribution of guilt is made according to vague racial-religious categories. So despite statements by President George Bush and both houses of Congress rejecting racial or religious profiling, there were many reported cases of racial discrimination: at least 80 passengers were removed from airlines after boarding because of perceived ethnicity; there were over 800 reported cases of employment discrimination; and many cases of discrimination in housing and provisions of other services (Ibish 2003).

Guilt by vague association is one problem intensified by images in Hollywood films, but there is another. Not only are the antagonists reduced to flat cliches, but the heroes, too, are no more complicated than GI Joe action figures. Like 20th century Westerns, these films end in a final shootout in which heavily armed Americans save the day. Such resolutions do not communicate the message that although this terrorist was stopped, there is an ongoing political crisis that must be resolved in other ways. The combination of a racialized enemy and total military victory provides powerful imagery lending emotional support only to violent solutions.

Stereotyping and Profiling

In the context of post-trauma stress and cultural myths of villains and heroes, law enforcement personnel can face significant emotional challenges expressed as zealotry. For example, a lawsuit filed in federal district court has challenged ethnic and religious bias in an unnecessary, unjustified, illegal, and degrading search of a 22-year-old United States citizen of Pakistani descent wearing a head covering November 2001 at O'Hare International Airport. After passing through the metal detector without setting it off, a member of the Illinois National Guard told a private security employee that the woman should be strip searched even after a hand-held metal detector search and a pat down of her body found nothing incriminating (ACLU 2002b).

Initiatives like putting the National Guard at airports or Operation Atlas, which put officers at bridges and tunnels, or Operation Hercules, which are roving armored vehicles and battle-ready police, may do little to stop terrorists, but they perform security for a public audience. Based on familiar Hollywood scripts, they may work against terror by projecting to the public that they are being protected. Seeing uniformed officers or armed soldiers might calm some people's fear of flying or entering the Holland Tunnel between Manhattan and New Jersey, but in the context of cultural myths of villains and heroes their stops are also likely to be based on perceived racial-religious cues.