Ethnic Profiling In Airport Screening: Lessons From Israel, 1968-2010

Is It the What or the How? The Roles of High-Policing Tactics and Procedural Justice in Predicting Perceptions of Hostile Treatment: The Case of Security Checks at Ben-Gurion Airport, Israel

“…This proposition was at the core of the appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court mentioned earlier. It is also in line with the “expressive harm” hypothesis (Risse & Zeckhauser ), linked to the setting of airport security profiling by Hasisi et al (). Notably, distributive justice received some attention in this context (Tyler et al ), and in our survey, the item The security officers treated me like every other passenger , which we have used to measure neutrality , could be viewed as partially tapping distributive justice.…”

“…19.2 percent were subjected to one extra measure; 9.2 percent to two, 3.7 percent to three, and only 0.7 percent were subjected to all four. Notably, in line with prior literature on profiling in airport security (e.g., Hasisi et al ), our data indicate that passengers were not subjected to these additional checks at random. As evident from Table , passengers who were subjected to at least one extra measure tended to be Israeli‐Arab or foreign passengers (as opposed to Israeli Jews).…”

“…In the present study, we focus exclusively on the third—security checks at the terminal, before check‐in. As evident from publicly available sources (e.g., Duek ; Hasisi et al ), these checks begin with a passport examination by a security officer and very brief questioning (roughly 30 seconds), including questions such as “where are you flying to?”; “where did you come to the airport from?”; “did you pack alone?”; “were you asked to deliver anything?” Following this short, often neutral conversation, passengers are typically directed to the check‐in counters to continue the boarding process.…”

“…We address this question in the context of airport security checks, which, since the terror attack of September 11, 2001, have become both very common and potentially invasive, humiliating and threatening (Hasisi et al 2012). We use a survey of 1,970 passengers boarding an airplane at Ben-Gurion Airport (Israel) to assess the effects of four "extra" security measures (being asked a large number of questions; being questioned by many security officers; having one's suitcase opened and searched; and being questioned away from the other passengers) on perceptions of hostile treatment (feeling humiliated, intimidated, and being treated with insensitivity), while accounting for the procedural justice displayed by the security officers (as experienced by the passenger).…”

In-secure identities: On the securitization of abnormality

“…As part of this process, it turned to Israeli security specialists. The Israeli aviation security, which was perceived as an unprecedented success in battling terror threats, exposed that its mode of operation was very much reliant on racial profiling (targeting all Muslim and Arab passengers) (Hasisi et al, 2012;Pfeffer, 2016).…”