‘Richard Jewell’: The Problem With Profiling

Richard Jewell is director Clint Eastwood’s well-acted, solidly scripted biopic about the racial-profiling fiasco that undermined the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing investigation. The FBI monomaniacally targeted an innocent rent-a-cop for being a Frustrated White Man, and then leaked his name to the press despite never having any actual evidence against him.

Much of the media has denounced Clint’s movie for casting aspersions upon America’s noble Deep State. Just because our beloved Intelligence Community has a lamentable track record of going off on wild-goose chases against innocent citizens and then inviting the press to pile on to turn their daily existences into living hells is no reason to, you know, make a movie about it. Some bits of history are best swept under the rug.

The New Yorker, for example, is hallucinatory with rage about the film:

Yet, paradoxically, there is another woman—an ultra-competent and accomplished woman—who’s never mentioned and never seen and yet is obliquely, perhaps unintentionally, implied throughout the movie: Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Amazon.com Gift Card i... Buy New $25.00 (as of 06:10 UTC - Details) Uh…no, actually the movie is not at all about Hillary.

Fortunately.

Jewell was working security during a concert at Atlanta’s downtown Centennial Park when he noticed a suspicious backpack under a bench. He began to clear the crowd, so when the three pipe bombs inside exploded thirteen minutes later, only one person was killed.

Jewell was initially acclaimed a hero. But when the FBI couldn’t come up with a clue who the terrorist was, they began to obsess over the notion that Jewell fit the profile of the lone white male who wants so much to be the good guy that he becomes the bad guy.

The FBI leaked this wild surmise to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which explained to its readers:

This profile generally includes a frustrated white man who is a former police officer, member of the military or police “wanna-be” who seeks to become a hero.

This was not a wholly ridiculous conjecture. For example, firemen who love fighting fires so much that they turn arsonist are hardly unknown. Joseph Wambaugh’s true-crime book Fire Lover tells of an arson investigator in my neighborhood who used to set stores where my mother shopped on fire so he could call in the first report.

But this is a memorable phenomenon, precisely because it’s also a fairly rare one.

The 1990s were the peak of the prestige of the FBI’s fad of “criminal-profiling” the perpetrators of exotic incidents, which was seen as more moral and scientific than the despised practice of racially profiling crack dealers.

Racial profiling relies upon common stereotypes about common criminals—for instance, that the black youth standing on the corner who dresses and acts like a drug dealer might indeed be a drug dealer. It tends to work because stereotypes are almost always statistically true on average. But the entire subject of black crime is so depressing and repetitious that everybody officially pretends that racial profiling can’t possibly work.

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