Profile: ‘hinky’
Bruce Schneier wrote an interesting article on behavioral assessment, a method of profiling on behavior rather than race or sex. Basically it’s that feeling you get when something just feels “hinky”. You know, it isn’t just one big thing that’s wrong, it’s a bunch of little things that don’t seem right when taken all together.
I got a taste of behavioral assessment about twenty-eight years ago when my brother, some friends and I were riding around in a car at around 11:00 at night. We were all in the eighteen to twenty year old range and there were five of us piled into 1972 Oldsmobile Cutlass driven by a friend of mine. This was during the time that eighteen year-olds were legally allowed to drink and we had been to a local bar. The guy driving didn’t drink and none of us had had more than a couple of beers at that time.
We had pulled out of the bar and driven a couple of blocks when a police officer pulled out behind us from a convenience store parking lot. After about a block my brother, who was sitting in the back seat, said, “I bet I can get him to pull us over just by looking at him.” He then began to take quick glances back over his shoulder out the back window of the car. It wasn’t half a block further when the blue lights came on.
Most of us in the car knew the cop and when he saw it was us he just had a laugh and commented on my brother looking at him. But I understood immediately why we were pulled over and it was a good call on his part to do so. It wasn’t that we had just pulled out of the parking lot of a bar and it wasn’t that we were five young males or that we were out at 11:00 at night, which in 1976 in Chattanooga was pretty late. It wasn’t even that my brother kept taking quick glances at him out the rear window of the car. It was all of it. We just looked “hinky” to him.
Society | Larry D. Burton | 15 December 2004 |
