An explosion on Saturday, September 17th in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York was handled quickly by the NYPD – but methods used had unintended ethical implications.
Early Monday morning, an emergency alert went out to millions of people in the New York area. The alert read “WANTED: Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28-yr-old male. See media for pic. Call 9-1-1 if seen.”
If you received this message and first mistook it for an Amber Alert, you weren’t the only one. The Wireless Emergency Alerts system is used, according to the FCC, for three reasons: Amber alerts, alerts from the president, and alerts involving imminent threats to safety. Most often these appear as weather emergencies or child abductions; never before had they been used as a sort of “WANTED” poster. The decision was made by the office of Mayor Bill de Blasio, with NYPD’s assistant commissioner Peter Donald backing the decision. PR Week reported Donald’s reasoning behind the decision, quoting him saying “We want people to know they should not live in fear, but be aware of their surroundings.”
In reality, the message did incite a climate of fear for the already vulnerable minority communities of New York. Without any link, picture, contextual information, or acknowledgment of any imminent danger or lack thereof, suddenly millions of people were on edge about someone whom they only knew was male and likely Middle Eastern. Imagine the fear that overcame every young man with brown skin or a Middle Eastern sounding name. Slate.com noted that the lack of context for this message was “asking people to go after a stereotype, not an individual.” This alert once again added to a dangerous stereotype and created fear surrounding our neighbors, our coworkers, our fellow citizens, our friends. As Brian Feldman of NY Mag said, “In a country where people are routinely harassed and assaulted for just appearing to be Muslim, this is remarkably ill-advised.” City officials should be aware of and sensitive to ongoing racial discrimination, rather than telling millions of New Yorkers to be suspicious about anyone who could possibly be named Ahmad. As one Twitter user stated:
Media platforms such as Twitter have frequently been used to release pressing news to the public due to social media’s ability to reach millions of people in a matter of seconds. And this has many benefits, such as enabling the NYPD to live tweet to residents where to go and what to do following the explosion. However, as we can see from this incident, the brief and limited nature of these messages risk a loss of nuance, with potentially dangerous ramifications. Authorities need to consider the implications of these rapid-fire alerts.
The suspect identified in the alert was arrested within a few hours, but as Slate.com reported, “There’s no evidence, at this point, that the mobile push notification helped authorities find him.”
This is not an isolated incident. The government is continually taking action that perpetuates the normality of racial profiling. Costs of War, a project focused on impacts and culture shifts following the September 11, 2001 attacks, has identified numerous instances in which Muslims and people of Arab and South Asian descent have become targets of government practices that encourage racial profiling. One example occurred in June 2002, when “then Attorney General John Ashcroft announced a “Special Registration” requirement that all males from a list of Arab and Muslim countries report to the government to register and be fingerprinted…. According to a statement [in May 2011] from the American Civil Liberties Union, the program never received a single terrorism-related conviction despite tens of thousands of people forced to register.” And that is only one of many examples.
Imagine trying to get on an airplane so you can go see your family, only to be “randomly selected” and bombarded with questions targeting every aspect of your religion, denying you the freedom of religion guaranteed by our Constitution.
Imagine being a child reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to a flag that represents a population of people who threaten your family members’ lives.
Imagine living in constant fear, heart pounding as you walk down the street to work, wondering if you’ll see your loved ones again.
Imagine being harassed by police on no ground, but having to be perfectly calm and compliant because you fear any misstep will result in your blood on the ground.
Imagine being scared to go to school, to leave your home, to even exist because of the color of your skin or origin of your name.
According to Costs of War, between 2000 and 2009, the amount of hate crime incidents against Muslims increased by over 500%, along with a 150% rise in workplace discrimination and an exponential increase in anti-Islamic bullying in schools. We are not in a “post-racial era”. This country, this great “melting pot of cultures”, this “country of immigrants”, is institutionally racist.
It’s not unfounded to be scared considering the amount of pain and terror that exists in this world. But this desperate need for self-preservation is causing our society to take the very things we fear – harm, loss, terror – and inflict them on members of our own community. We have witnessed major terrorist attacks carried out by radical Muslim-identifying terrorists, but it is both dangerous and unethical for us to equate this to an entire population. Why are we holding millions of innocent, hardworking Muslim Americans accountable for the actions of a few, when in fact according to the Huffington Post, “most mass killings in our country have been carried out by white, male, Christian, Americans.”?
Fear is dividing the world, and changing this tide starts with our leaders. It is vital that the actions of our authorities are founded on an awareness of the influence and implications of their public notices and actions, and met with accountability for potential impact. Simply providing more context would have gone a long way in protecting minority communities from facing even more suspicion, hatred, and harm, rather than villainizing an entire community that is already victimized by racial profiling.