"Suspicious Activity?" Really?

Maybe the outlets I'm seeing this stuff at aren't telling the whole story. As reported by Mia de Graaf and Snejana Farberov at the Daily Mail:

Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27, were apparently working late at night in their garage and receiving numerous packages to their home in Redlands, California.

But according to nearby residents, they did not report them for fear of [being accused of?] racial profiling.

Katie Pavlich at Town Hall reports similarly, embedding a tweet from @WillCarrFNC:

Neighbors: 3-4 "middle easterners" had recently moved into the apt of interest. getting a lots of package deliveries

Pavlich compares said tinkering and package receipts to Nidal Hassan "spouting violent Islamic propaganda to neighbors." WTF?

News flash:

If you think your neighbors tinkering in their garage at night and receiving lots of packages is "suspicious," you're paranoid (which, as this case establishes, doesn't necessarily mean they aren't out to get you ... or to get someone, anyway ... but you're paranoid nonetheless).

And if your reason for thinking that it's "suspicious" to tinker in the garage at night and receive lots of package is that they look like "middle easterners," then yes, what you are doing is racial profiling (or at least ethnic profiling).

My household receives lots of packages. I'm always getting books, etc. in the mail; the kids have bank accounts and their meager allowances are automagically deposited in same, accessible by debit card, so they're always ordering crap from Amazon, eBay, Etsy, etc.

We don't have a garage. The guy across the street does, though, and he's always tinkering in it because he's a mechanic and he's always working on one of his cars or one of his friends' cars.

Of course, none of the parties mentioned look like "middle easterners," so I guess none of us are "suspicious."

It's bad enough that these neighbor are guilt-tripping themselves after the fact for not being suspicious of un-suspicious activities (or, if they were suspicious, dismissing those suspicions for the well-founded reason that the suspicions amounted to racial profiling and were therefore irrational, even if correct).

It's worse that a bunch of idiots seem to be actively encouraging that false kind of guilt and implicitly encouraging everyone else to go batsh*t insane if a swarthy new neighbor orders too much stuff from Fingerhut and changes his own oil.