Thanks to my parents, my education and my life experiences up to this point, I think profiling — the inclusion of racial or ethnic characteristics in determining whether a person is significantly more likely to commit a particular type of crime or illegal act than the general population— and policemen’s and other officials’ profiling-founded actions are, like all stereotyping, generally wrong.

Indeed, no well-documented evidence exists to support such practices as asking more young drivers than old to blow into breathalyzers or pulling over and searching the vehicles of more African-Americans than Caucasians. Granted, a larger number of DWIs and DUIs are issued to young people than old, and African-American men are by far the most common occupants of prisons. Yet, according to a policeman friend of mine, this only proves the practice. Young people, he said, are seen as the most important drunk drivers to nab, even though a much larger number of middle-aged adults — including policemen — drive drunkenly every day and night. He likewise estimated that African-Americans are some two or three times as likely to have their vehicles searched as whites, and opined that if this wasn’t the case, millions of young college-age Caucasians would be sitting in prisons on drug charges.

Even the ethnic profiling that has become so prominent since Sept. 11, 2001, — that of Americans of Middle-Eastern origin, or even mere appearance — is unfounded. The 9/11 hijackers may have been Arab, but they were far from American. And, though Arab-Americans are undoubtedly subjected to more suspicious looks and pat-downs in airports than the average Joe, not a single case has been reported in which one such individual was found with a weapon, a bomb, or the like.

Thanks to the event that occurred on Dec. 25,  the attempted murder of all 300 passengers on Northwest Airlines’ Detroit-bound Flight 253 and who knows how many others by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the al-Qaida-in-the-Arabian-Peninsula-trained “underwear bomber,” — the time for an acceptable type of profiling has come. This profiling is the enhanced screening not of flyers from “countries of interest,” as was ordered by President Obama in the wake of the failed attack, but rather of all non-American flyers traveling to the United States from any and all foreign countries.

Doing so will no doubt annoy the American Civil Liberty Unions, require the purchase of better scanning technologies and the training and hiring of thousands of new Transportation Security Administration workers. Most of these workers will be stationed overseas, and frustrate foreign flyers, thereby potentially delivering a hit to America’s tourism industry. Despite these factors, it is both acceptable and necessary. It is the former because, unlike the profiling that I cite as wrong, it will not single out incoming foreigners of a particular gender, race, ethnicity or even nationality. It is the latter because what occurred Christmas Day proved that we can expect neither our country’s gargantuan post 9/11 security complex, nor other countries’ airport employees, to pick up on and, more importantly, act on the easily visible clues that should scream potential terrorist.

As President Obama admitted following a security summit at the White House on Jan. 5, “The bottom line is this: The U.S. government had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack, but our intelligence community failed to connect those dots.”

Indeed, in the case of Abdulmutallab, the most glaring “dot” for the U.S. government was that Abdulmutallab’s own father, a reputable Nigerian businessman, visited the U.S. embassy in Abuja on Nov. 19 to warn that his son had become an outspoken anti-American. He notified them that his son seemed to have developed Jihadist sympathies and had abandoned his privileged life to travel to Yemen — an extremely poor country in the Middle East where, most notably, 17 American sailors were killed when the USS Cole was bombed by al-Qaida back on Oct. 12, 2000. All of this led U.S. officials to add “Abdulmutallab” to a 550,000-name National Counterterrorism Center’s Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database, yet somehow did not result in the revocation of the multiple-entry visa that allowed him to board a U.S. bound plane.

But government decision makers were not the only individuals who missed obvious clues that should have raised suspicions. The individual that Abdulmutallab bought his ticket from at the Accra International Airport in Ghana on Dec. 23, for example, apparently found it completely normal for a young man to pay for his ticket with $2,831 in cash. When Abdulmutallab checked in Dec. 25 for his flight, another individual apparently found it normal for a flyer to be equipped with nothing but a carry-on bag, though he was traveling to a bitterly cold destination halfway around the world.   

Therefore, with many clue-missers to blame, the case of Northwest 253 should make it clear that things need to change.

For, as Obama put it, “We dodged a bullet.” And no, we did not dodge it, as many government officials are now claiming, because of the brave passengers who subdued Abdulmutallab after the liquid bomb in his pants failed to detonate.

We dodged it because of luck — something that is nice to have around, but will eventually run out. No, I’d much rather rely on the profiling of inbound foreigners: Something that sounds bad but, until and unless our screening system proves itself, seems our best hope.

Steve Adams is a graduate student in journalism and mass communication from Annapolis, Md.