Are the Mall of America's security guards targeting minorities and putting them on a terrorism watchlist?

Programs aimed at keeping a lookout for potential terrorists are not about profiling, government officials stress. But an analysis of suspicious activity reports of incidents at the Mall of America near Minneapolis, by NPR News Investigations and the Center for Investigative Reporting, suggests that the Mall of America may be questioning people based partly on their appearance.

From the more than 1,000 pages of suspicious activity reports examined, the documents suggest almost two-thirds of the "suspicious" people whom the Mall reported to local police were minorities. Compare that with the U.S. population, which is more than 70 percent white. And whites account for 85 percent of the population in Minnesota.

One evening last summer, Nauman Tariq had just pulled out of the Mall of America parking lot with his father sitting beside him in the car. Suddenly a police car started tailgating them with its lights flashing. Two more cruisers moved in.

"I mean this kind of stuff you see in the movies, like cops coming up, and pulling over and surrounding you," Tariq, a brain specialist at three hospitals in Minneapolis, says. "We can't even imagine it's going to happen to us for no reason."

The police ordered Tariq out of the car, frisked him and put him in the back seat of a patrol car. While he was sitting there, he craned his neck to read the policeman's computer on the front seat.

"My name was there on the laptop with my address and there was this highlighted sentence saying that [he was a] 'possible terrorist threat,' " Tariq says. "So that was something which at that time I realized that there was something seriously wrong here."

The report on the incident, which NPR and the Center for Investigative Reporting obtained from police files in Bloomington, Minn., says that the Mall of America's private security unit flagged Tariq as a "possible terrorist."

One of the police officers told him why:

"He said that the Mall of America contacted the police because I was doing some suspicious activity," Tariq says. "And I asked him what did I do, and all he could tell me was I used the bathroom, it looked like I was walking fast with my father and I was using my cellphone a lot."

The police report confirms that explanation. The police let Tariq go after 45 minutes. But he says there's another reason why the mall's security unit might have suspected he was a terrorist.

"I look like a Muslim from a mile away," he says, laughing. "Meaning that I have a beard, I don't have a mustache, and my color, it's Middle Eastern, my skin color."


Links:
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/08/140262005/mall-counterterrorism-files-id-mostly-minorities

http://www.startribune.com/business/129559713.html