Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | C | Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice

Risks, ethics, and airport security.

Article Excerpt
The central issues addressed in this article concern the political and ethical implications of shifting from a rule-based system of airport security to one based on risk. To begin with, however, it needs to be made clear in what this shift consists. What are the practices that are being contrasted? "Rule-based" or "bureaucratic" security refers to a setting characterized by uniform practices in which every case is accorded the same degree of scrutiny. This implies that, in the absence of some specific issue that draws attention to a specific case, all cases are treated as equal risks--probably meaning, in practice, that all cases will be treated as moderate risks. Thus, from this perspective, the gist of the issue regarding rule-based versus risk-based models of security would appear to focus on issues relating to selective attention given to high-risk cases. Yet once this is said, it is immediately clear that risk- and rule-based approaches are not mutually exclusive. For example, the "specific issues" that do draw attention to certain individuals are, at least in a loose sense, risk based. Such matters are likely to be things that indicate risks to security staff even though these are not necessarily generated by statistical data or security information. Such attention might be generated out of the working theories of security staff, built up out of years of experience and/or learned on the job from others. In this sense, rule-based regimes of security frequently include an informal apparatus for assessing risks. This being the case, a move to a "risk-based" approach will not necessarily entail a radical transformation but, rather, will represent the formalization and intensification of practices that are already in place. By this I mean both that risk will become the central issue in every case and that the model for assessing risk will be formalized in the form of a risk schedule or some other practice based on risk profiles and risk factors. Risk will be assessed not just by the official on the spot, according to personal experience or professional knowledge, but by a formal technique of risk calculation.

Moving toward such a risk-based model of security requires being reasonably clear about the precise nature of the risk technique being deployed. I would suggest that judgement about the costs and benefits of deploying risk will always need to focus on the specific technique involved, because risk is a fairly abstract technology involving the probabilistic prediction of harmful outcomes. While it is possible to draw some conclusions from the abstract form of risk--as I will attempt to do shortly--we need always to look at the specific ways in which risk is deployed, the other practices with which it is articulated, and so...