economist ethnically profiled,interrogated for doing math on American Airlines flight

[GMDino]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2016/05/07/ivy-league-economist-interrogated-for-doing-math-on-american-airlines-flight/

Quote:On Thursday evening, a 40-year-old man — with dark, curly hair, olive skin and an exotic foreign accent — boarded a plane. It was a regional jet making a short, uneventful hop from Philadelphia to nearby Syracuse.


Or so dozens of unsuspecting passengers thought.

The curly-haired man tried to keep to himself, intently if inscrutably scribbling on a notepad he’d brought aboard. His seatmate, a blond-haired, 30-something woman sporting flip-flops and a red tote bag, looked him over. He was wearing navy Diesel jeans and a red Lacoste sweater – a look he would later describe as “simple elegance” – but something about him didn’t seem right to her.

She decided to try out some small talk.

Is Syracuse home? She asked.

No, he replied curtly.

He similarly deflected further questions. He appeared laser-focused — perhaps too laser-focused — on the task at hand, those strange scribblings.

Rebuffed, the woman began reading her book. Or pretending to read, anyway. Shortly after boarding had finished, she flagged down a flight attendant and handed that crew-member a note of her own.

Then the passengers waited, and waited, and waited for the flight to take off. After they’d sat on the tarmac for about half an hour, the flight attendant approached the female passenger again and asked if she now felt okay to fly, or if she was “too sick.”

I’m OK to fly, the woman responded.

She must not have sounded convincing, though; American Airlines flight 3950 remained grounded.

Then, for unknown reasons, the plane turned around and headed back to the gate. The woman was soon escorted off the plane. On the intercom a crew member announced that there was paperwork to fill out, or fuel to refill, or some other flimsy excuse; the curly-haired passenger could not later recall exactly what it was.

The wait continued.

Finally the pilot came by, and approached the real culprit behind the delay: that darkly-complected foreign man. He was now escorted off the plane, too, and taken to meet some sort of agent, though he wasn’t entirely sure of the agent’s affiliation, he would later say.

What do know about your seatmate? The agent asked the foreign-sounding man.

Well, she acted a bit funny, he replied, but she didn’t seem visibly ill. Maybe, he thought, they wanted his help in piecing together what was wrong with her.

And then the big reveal: The woman wasn’t really sick at all! Instead this quick-thinking traveler had Seen Something, and so she had Said Something.

That Something she’d seen had been her seatmate’s cryptic notes, scrawled in a script she didn’t recognize. Maybe it was code, or some foreign lettering, possibly the details of a plot to destroy the dozens of innocent lives aboard American Airlines Flight 3950. She may have felt it her duty to alert the authorities just to be safe. The curly-haired man was, the agent informed him politely, suspected of terrorism.

The curly-haired man laughed.

He laughed because those scribbles weren’t Arabic, or another foreign language, or even some special secret terrorist code. They were math.

Yes, math. A differential equation, to be exact.

Had the crew or security members perhaps quickly googled this good-natured, bespectacled passenger before waylaying everyone for several hours, they might have learned that he — Guido Menzio — is a young but decorated Ivy League economist. And that he’s best known for his relatively technical work on search theory, which helped earn him a tenured associate professorship at the University of Pennsylvania as well as stints at Princeton and Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

Guido Menzio, an economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

They might even have discovered that last year he was awarded the prestigious Carlo Alberto Medal, given to the best Italian economist under 40. That’s right: He’s Italian, not Middle Eastern, or whatever heritage usually gets ethnically profiled on flights these days.

Menzio had been on the first leg of a connecting flight to Ontario, where he would give a talk at Queen’s University on a working paper he co-authored about menu costs and price dispersion. His nosy neighbor had spied him trying to work out some properties of the model of price-setting he was about to present. Perhaps she couldn’t differentiate between differential equations and Arabic.

Menzio showed the authorities his calculations and was allowed to return to his seat, he told me by email. He said the pilot seemed embarrassed. Soon after, the flight finally took off, more than two hours after its scheduled departure time for what would be just a 41-minute trip in the air, according to flight-tracking data.

The woman never reboarded to the flight.

Casey Norton, a spokesman for American Airlines (whose regional partner Air Wisconsin operated the flight), said the woman had indeed initially told the crew she was sick, but when she deplaned she disclosed that the reason she was feeling ill was her concern about the behavior of her seatmate. At that time, she requested to be rebooked on another flight. The crew then called for security personnel, who interviewed Menzio and determined him not to be a “credible threat.” Norton did not know whether the woman was ever notified that Menzio had been cleared. (He said he was not allowed to give out her name for privacy reasons, and since Menzio did not know it either, I have not been able to contact the woman for comment.)

Whenever there are conflicts between passengers, Norton said, “we try to work with them peacefully to resolve it,” whether that means changing seat assignments or switching someone to take a different flight. When asked how often customers raise similar suspicions about fellow passengers that turn out to be unfounded, he said it happens “from time to time” but declined to provide details about frequency.

Menzio for his part says he was “treated respectfully throughout,” though he remains baffled and frustrated by a “broken system that does not collect information efficiently.” He is troubled by the ignorance of his fellow passenger, as well as “A security protocol that is too rigid–in the sense that once the whistle is blown everything stops without checks–and relies on the input of people who may be completely clueless. ”

Rising xenophobia stoked by the presidential campaign, he suggested, may soon make things worse for people who happen to look a little other-ish.

[*Nately120*]

This is an economic formula:




If you can honestly admit you can tell the difference between this and terrorism, I'm impressed!

Seriously though, I am beyond amused we live in a country where white men are encouraged to walk around with assault rifles but Italians can't do math.

[Rotobeast]

(05-07-2016, 06:02 PM)Nately120 Wrote: This is an economic formula:




If you can honestly admit you can tell the difference between this and terrorism, I'm impressed!

Seriously though, I am beyond amused we live in a country where white men are encouraged to walk around with assault rifles but Italians can't do math.

I can see the "Die Infidel, Die !" in there.

[Benton]

I would rather people speak up when they're concerned. Ultimately it's a headache for security, but isn't that why we're pumping tax dollars into extra security? Hundreds of millions to Homeland Security grants every year, extra checks at airports. I don't fault the woman for being concerned, but airport security should vet the guy fairly quickly and move on.

[StLucieBengal]

Really I have no problem with them pulling people aside. They should be targeting people instead of forcing everyone and wasting money.

[Brownshoe]

(05-07-2016, 06:02 PM)Nately120 Wrote: This is an economic formula:




If you can honestly admit you can tell the difference between this and terrorism, I'm impressed!

Seriously though, I am beyond amused we live in a country where white men are encouraged to walk around with assault rifles but Italians can't do math.

Italians are... White (caucasian)

[McC]

Better to have ten thousand innocent people hassled than one guilty one bring down a plane full of innocent people.

I know this doesn't mesh with this artificial PC bullshit culture in which we live. The real reality is that no one would want their loved ones to die because a suicide bomber slipped though the cracks. You can't have it both ways.

That's the way vigilance works. It's not always perfect but if beats the lack of it.

I know some of you guys spent a silly amount of time scouring the internet to find stories like these so you can prove over and over again how enlightened you are.

[GMDino]

(05-08-2016, 10:23 AM)McC Wrote: Better to have ten thousand innocent people hassled than one guilty one bring down a plane full of innocent people.

I know this doesn't mesh with this artificial PC bullshit culture in which we live.  The real reality is that no one would want their loved ones to die because a suicide bomber slipped though the cracks.  You can't have it both ways.

That's the way vigilance works.  It's not always perfect but if beats the lack of it.

I know some of you guys spent a silly amount of time scouring the internet to find stories like these so you can prove over and over again how enlightened you are.

Actually it was all over the news.

But while I understand the desire to pigeon hole things and say if you see a brown person doing something you don't understand / like you should panic there is also something to be said about people being paranoid about things they don't understand like only when a brown person does them.

[*bfine32*]

That article and writer are absolutely hilarious,but I guess it feeds its target audience.

[GMDino]

(05-08-2016, 11:27 AM)bfine32 Wrote: That article and writer are absolutely hilarious,but I guess it feeds its target audience.

Solid post on the topic of the article.

Thanks for your insight.

[*bfine32*]

(05-08-2016, 12:14 PM)GMDino Wrote: Solid post on the topic of the article.

Thanks for your insight.

So now we can only comment on the topic and not the source? Sounds good. The article is designed to paint anyone that suspects foul play on an aircraft as an ignorant bigot. Ask yourself why we needed to know that the lady making the observation was a blond wearing flip flops. Then further ask yourself why the man is constantly refereed to in the descriptive such as: curly-haired, olive-skinned, foreigner, ect..Answer those questions and you will determine why I find this article to be hilarious and those that it feeds are equally as amusing. 

[GMDino]

(05-08-2016, 01:25 PM)bfine32 Wrote: So now we can only comment on the topic and not the source? Sounds good. The article is designed to paint anyone that suspects foul play on an aircraft as an ignorant bigot. Ask yourself why we needed to know that the lady making the observation was a blond wearing flip flops. Then further ask yourself why the man is constantly refereed to in the descriptive such as: curly-haired, olive-skinned, foreigner, ect..Answer those questions and you will determine why I find this article to be hilarious and those that it feeds are equally as amusing. 

Because those were the actual facts of the situation.

Because I while person saw a brown person doing something they didn't understand and held up a flight and got off the plane and suffers no consequences (so far) for her actions.

I find amusing folks who think as long as it isn't a white guy getting profiled its, well, amusing.

[Rotobeast]

(05-08-2016, 01:37 PM)GMDino Wrote: Because those were the actual facts of the situation.

Because I while person saw a brown person doing something they didn't understand and held up a flight and got off the plane and suffers no consequences (so far) for her actions.

I find amusing folks who think as long as it isn't a white guy getting profiled its, well, amusing.

Of course she didn't understand the situation.
We're talking about a blonde and a differential equation here !


Seriously though, I'd probably give about anyone a pass on figuring out it was an equation ( given it was hand-written ).
However, I don't understand what would be so dangerous about someone writing something.

[StLucieBengal]

(05-08-2016, 01:25 PM)bfine32 Wrote: So now we can only comment on the topic and not the source? Sounds good. The article is designed to paint anyone that suspects foul play on an aircraft as an ignorant bigot. Ask yourself why we needed to know that the lady making the observation was a blond wearing flip flops. Then further ask yourself why the man is constantly refereed to in the descriptive such as: curly-haired, olive-skinned, foreigner, ect..Answer those questions and you will determine why I find this article to be hilarious and those that it feeds are equally as amusing. 

Come on bfine....  These guys NEVER comment about a source.   How dare you try to do so.....   

[StLucieBengal]

I know some of you want to complain about the poor foreign scholar who was only doing his math. How could these ignorant amercians always pick on the foreign scholars who are only trying to do good in the world.....

When I travel to Belarus no matter how many times I go there I get the same treatment .... They see I am an amercian and I get the full scan with my documents checked and questioned thoroughly. It's part of the deal of traveling. When any former soviet states travel here they have to go through additional screening.... Why we screen them is beyond me.... They don't blow up planes or cause any trouble. Unless it's the Chechens.

When I was in turkey I got the extra screening... Same with Moscow.

It's beneficial to target people from certain regions or countries. It's not racist ..... It's reasonable to expect and easy enough to abide. Like I said before, we should be doing more of this and less of worrying if someone thinks we are targeting people for anything other than likelihood of a crime.

[*bfine32*]

(05-08-2016, 01:37 PM)GMDino Wrote: Because I while person saw a brown person doing something they didn't understand and held up a flight and got off the plane and suffers no consequences (so far) for her actions.

I have absolutely no idea what you are trying to say here. 

But hey, thanks to that hard-hitting, facts-based article; we know she was wearing flip flops. Uh oh Sandals, the common footwear of Arabs; maybe that is why she didn't get back on (not allowed back on) the plane. Or maybe it was because she was a woman. Contact Catherine Rampell I think we have a subject for her next hard-hitting, facts-based article. 

[*bfine32*]

(05-08-2016, 02:16 PM)StLucieBengal Wrote: Come on bfine....  These guys NEVER comment about a source.   How dare you try to do so.....   

Not sure what I was thinking. 

[Brownshoe]

(05-08-2016, 01:37 PM)GMDino Wrote: Because those were the actual facts of the situation.

Because I while person saw a brown person doing something they didn't understand and held up a flight and got off the plane and suffers no consequences (so far) for her actions.

I find amusing folks who think as long as it isn't a white guy getting profiled its, well, amusing.

He is a white guy....

[*bfine32*]

(05-08-2016, 04:47 PM)Brownshoe Wrote: He is a white guy....

You do realize in this forum that race is not based on physical attributes. Makes it so much easier to call someone a racist. 

[BengalsRocker]

Wouldn't it have been just as easy to tell the woman you are an Economist working on a math formula?

The fact that Airport Security were trying to be vague and not put the guy on the spot(probably not too offend in public)is where the real fault is here.


I just saw the new Captain America at the movie theater this weekend and they ran a service announcement about "sketchy characters".

Basically they were saying pay attention and report something even if it's nothing.

Just like taking your shoes off at the airport.  It's the world we live in.

People will make mistakes.  It's not perfect...  but safety is the main agenda.