Racial profiling

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Racial profiling is the inclusion of race as a primary determinant in the characterization of a person considered likely to commit a particular type of crime (see Offender Profiling). Towards the end of the 20th century in the United States, the practice fell into disfavor with the general public as abuses by law enforcement came to light.

Criminal Advocates are against the use of racial profiling tactics by the police. They argue that the disproportionate number of convicted minorities is due to "racial profiling".

Countering this, it is argued that including race as one of the several factors in suspect profiling is generally supported by the law enforcement community within the Western world. It is claimed that profiling based on "any" characteristic is a time-tested and universal police tool, and that excluding race as a factor is insensible.

Criticism

Critics argue that race should:

• never be considered for any reason in a police action (save the exceptions made below).
• never be considered the primary or motivating factor for suspicion.
• only be considered when it is used to describe a specific suspect in a specific crime and only when used in a manner like other physical descriptions (e.g., hair color, weight, distinguishing marks). This is often referred to as the "be on the lookout" (B.O.L.O.) exception.
• even if race could be helpful, use of race may cause many more errors where the actual offender happened not to fit the race predicted by the model and law enforcement fails to capture the suspect.

It is sometimes necessary to consider racial factors in a way that may not be immediately apparent from the above when dealing with hate crimes and the like, though it is very rare to think of situations where racial profiling would aid police decision making in this context.

Some groups argue that if a disproportional number of members of a race are, for example, stopped, searched, or arrested, compared to the general population or to other races, it is due to discrimination. Some also suggest that, in the United States, the government does not have the right to conduct racial profiling. The Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees the right to be safe from unreasonable search and seizure without probable cause. Since the vast majority of people of all races are law-abiding citizens, merely being of a race which a police officer believes to be more likely to commit a crime than another is not probable cause. In addition, the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution requires that all US citizens be treated equally under the law. It has been argued that this makes it unconstitutional for a representative of the government to make decisions based on race. This view has been upheld by the US Supreme Court in Batson v. Kentucky and several other cases.

Some groups also argue that police who focus their limited attention on one racial group allow criminals from other racial groups to go free. In the days immediately following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, law enforcement spent a disproportionate amount of time and resources on two men of middle eastern descent. It turned out that this terrorist attack was perpetrated by a white male; if the terrorist had planned more than one attack, the waste of limited resources investigating men of middle eastern descent could have cost lives.

In Los Angeles in December of 2001, a man of Middle Eastern descent named Assem Bayaa cleared all the security checks in the airport. He was an American citizen and he got on a plane to New York. He had barely gotten settled in his seat when he was told that he made the crew uncomfortable by being on board the plane. Once Bayaa got off the plane, he wasn't searched or questioned any further. The only consolation he was given was a boarding pass for the next flight to New York. The luggage he had checked wasn't even taken off the plane he was originally on. He filed a lawsuit on the basis of discrimination against United Airlines, who filed a motion that said that because of national security, they don't have to obey civil rights protection laws. The motion was dismissed on October 11, 2002. The district judge ruled that a pilot's discretion "does not grant them a license to discriminate," (The Advocate, Santa Clara University School of Law Newsletter).

Racial profiling involves police use of race as a key factor in decisions to stop and interrogate people. More specifically, it can be defined as "the practice of constructing a set of characteristics or behaviors based on race and using that set of characteristics to decide whether an individual might be guilty of some crime and therefore worthy of investigation or arrest," (McGraw Hill Online Learning Center). In airports, racial profiling is sometimes used to pick who to search more carefully and extensively than everyone else. If a person's physical features look like those specific to someone of Middle Eastern descent, then they're generally more likely to be stopped and searched thoroughly than someone who has the physical features of a European person. It has also been pointed out that many Arabs and South Asians resemble South (and occasionally even North) Europeans. Racial profiling has raised a lot of controversy over whether it's constitutional.

United States debate on racial profiling

In the United States, the term "racial profiling" has often been paired with accusations of racial discrimination against blacks and Hispanics, particularly by police. It is one type of racially biased policing. Racially biased policing includes other practices such as discriminatory treatment of racial and ethnic minorities not based on profiling, and differential police practices in neighborhoods populated by minorities compared to neighborhoods populated by whites (Weitzer and Tuch 2006).

According to some advocates, only the non-racial factors are justified in suspect profiling; police should ignore any ethnic or racial information they have on people involved in the illegal drug trade. These advocates regard the inclusion of racial characteristics, even as one of several factors as "racial profiling" and oppose it. Most Americans oppose domestic (non airline) racial profiling. In a 2002 poll, for instance, 73 percent of whites, 77 percent of Hispanics, and 91 percent of African Americans disapproved of racial profiling by the police (Weitzer and Tuch 2006).

Organizations such as NAACP and the ACLU are staunchly opposed to "racial profiling". Most crime is committed by whites, they say, and profiling based exclusively on race singles out minorities such as African-Americans and those of Hispanic descent. They also dispute the claim that more crime is committed by minorities, because, they say, it has been statistically proven to not be the case^{[citation needed]}. Some also take issue with the police having the prerogative to use race as a factor, as this leaves minorities little recourse if unfairly harassed by police.^{[citation needed]}

Many people blamed racial profiling for the shooting of Amadou Diallo by the New York City Police Department. The officers involved claimed they had mistaken Diallo for a wanted rapist. Critics feel that the police were suspicious of Diallo simply because he was a black man walking down the street after midnight.

In the wake of the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack the issue of "racial profiling" has become political, as the urgency of preventing terrorists from boarding aircraft has again risen.

According to a Gallup poll conducted shortly after the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack, 71 percent of blacks, and 57 percent of whites, supported racial profiling of Arabs and South Asians at airport security checkpoints.[1]Another poll conducted in 2002 by the survey group Public Agenda found that in the post-9/11 world the public rejected some forms of racial profiling more strongly than others. The survey found 52 percent said there was "no excuse" for profiling of blacks, but two-thirds said profiling of Arabs and South Asians was "understandable, but you wish it didn't happen."[2] Even so, the survey found most people were uncomfortable with blatant profiling of Arabs or South Asian airline passengers.[3]. Racial profiling has become an oversimplified focus of discussion; more recently, productive alternatives including passport profiling, behaviour profiling and age profiling have become topics of consideration.

Some statistics from the US and Canada indicate that Asians are among the least arrested by police, proportionally.^{[citation needed]} The numbers of course differ depending on how one defines Asian.

In the late 1990's, the New Jersey State Police was rocked by a racial profiling scandal. Allegations were made that black motorists were being pulled over disproportionately on the New Jersey Turnpike, for no reason other than race alone. Many rank-and-file troopers testified that their supervisors had ordered them to engage in this practice. A nationwide scandal erupted, which ultimately resulted in a federal monitor watching over the department. In a "consent decree," the State Police agreed to adopt a new policy that no individual may be detained based on race, unless said individual matches the description of a specific suspect.[4][5]

United Kingdom

In the UK in the early 1980s evidence showed that black people were as much as five times more likely to be stopped by the police^{[citation needed]}, hence the colloquial term, Driving While Black. This is possibly an example of racial profiling.

On July 22, 2005, London Metropolitan Police shot and killed Jean Charles de Menezes, a suspected suicide bomber. Some critics remarked that the situation was aggravated because Menezes looked Middle Eastern; in fact he was Brazilian.

See also

• Discrimination
• Race and crime
• Media and ethnicity
• Affirmative action

References

Ronald Weitzer and Steven Tuch. 2006. Race and Policing in America: Conflict and Reform (New York: Cambridge University Press).

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