The city of Burlington has recently hired a new chief of police, Brandon Del Pozo, who was previously a New York Police Department beat patrolman, precinct commander and NYPD representative in Jordan, where he investigated terrorist events in an attempt to broaden the NYPD’s knowledge of such activities. 
During the course of his approval process, he was sharply questioned on a paper he had written 15 years ago that examined profiling in police work. Fortunately for Burlington, this highly qualified and thoughtful individual ultimately passed muster and was unanimously hired by the city council.
The threat of terrorism in this country is very real. While al-Qaida could conceivably mount another operation like 9/11, it is more likely that ISIS or one of its affiliates will manage to radicalize one or more Americans and encourage them to commit less dramatic but highly effective acts of terrorism.
What we are facing are self-motivated individuals who, through their own initiative, independently join the ranks of radical Islamists. The result is that U.S. law enforcement, whether national, state or local, is faced with the extraordinarily difficult job of somehow finding and disrupting self-motivated individuals bent on terrorist acts, before those acts are carried out. 
The process of self-motivation is largely passive. Those who go that route simply log onto jihadi websites and learn what they want to know without necessarily having any direct, traceable contact with other radical Islamists. A perfect example of this is the self-radicalization of the Tsarnayev brothers and their attack on the Boston Marathon. Moreover, in the wake of the Snowden revelations, finding these highly random apprentice terrorists through legal technical intercept operations is likely to be a daunting task.
Radical Islamists, or those like al-Qaida and ISIS, represent only a tiny fraction of Muslims worldwide. We tend to think of Muslims mostly as Arabs, but, in fact, totaling around l.6 billion souls, they are also in the old Yugoslavia and Albania, Africans throughout that continent, Chechens in Russia, central Asians across the southern edge of the old Soviet Union, Iranians, Indonesians, Malaysians, Turks, Kurds, Pakistanis and Indians as well as Bangladeshis. And they have minority groupings in many other countries around the world, including the United States and Israel.
So when it comes to counterterrorist operations, there really isn’t any such thing as racial profiling. Radical Islamic terrorists can be just about any color, any race. The only thing they have in common is their religion. So, to be honest, if you see radical Islamic terrorism as a real problem, you have to look closely at Muslims.
And the truth is that the vast majority of Muslims have reason to be more terrified by radical Islam than do non-Muslim Americans. In fact, most of the people murdered by ISIS in the Middle East have been Muslims of one sort or another who, most importantly, are not sufficiently pure in the eyes of ISIS. Moderates understand this and are our natural allies
So, when we look carefully at Muslim populations in America in the hope that we can find members of those communities who recognize the unity of interest that they have with non-Muslim Americans, are we profiling? Is what we are doing wrong?
America has had this problem over and over in the past. When that has been the case, we have not hesitated to profile our logical targets. We have asked sympathetic members of hostile groups to help us in the difficult task of overcoming these threats. Why should it be any different today? 
It is through relationships with American law enforcement organizations that American Muslims ultimately can best protect themselves against radical Islam. They are the people in America most likely to be able to assist in the extremely difficult process of trying to identify self-radicalized Muslims who are intent on committing terrorist acts. They are the strongest potential allies we have in this struggle. 
As long as they see the U.S. government as opposed to radical Islam and not opposed to moderates, they will be able to find ways to help us. As we continue to withdraw our military personnel from the Middle East where they are, unfortunately, viewed even by moderate Muslims as enemies of a broader Islam, we will find American and other moderate Muslims more and more willing to help is in the struggle with fundamentalist Islam.