Racial Profiling

A detailed Summary of Racial Profiling

Racial profiling is the tactic of stopping someone because of the color of his or her skin and fleeting suspicion that the person is engaging in criminal behavior. This practice can be conducted with routine traffic stops, or can be completely random based on the car that is driven, or the number of people in the car and the race of the driver and the passengers. Racial profiling has been a part of the criminal justice system for a long time now, and is nothing new. The only reason why you hear a lot more about this topic is because the use of media has brought this very controversial topic to the public's attention a lot more than in the past. The question that remains unanswered is, is racial profiling good or bad, and does it really have an effect on the way police fight crime effectively ?

Racial profiling can be broken down into two meanings, hard profiling and soft profiling. A case of hard profiling would be when a officer sees a black person and without more to go on, pulls him over for a pat-down on the chance that he may be carrying drugs or weapons. Soft profiling would a case like when the state police get a tip off that a certain nationality is trafficking drugs down a certain highway

The New Century Foundation published a report on the American Renaissance website, stating that African Americans commit 90 percent of the approximately 1,700,000 interracial crimes of violence that occurs every year in the United States. They are more than fifty times more likely to commit violent crimes against whites than vice versa. According to this same report, these crimes target whites slightly more than half the time. The foundation believes that these crime statistics warrant racial profiling as a crime deterrent and believe that it may even reduce crime. Another article on the same website states that racial profiling is frequently used, not only in law enforcement, but also in everyday existence. We face a world of costly and incomplete educations, and that means we have to do a lot of guessing and playing hunches.

No matter what people say, there is simply nothing illegal about using race as a factor in determining criminal suspiciousness. The initial decision to pull over a car should be based almost always on seriousness of the traffic violation, and if there is evidence of other law breaking activity such as drug use. When a officer is working a three or four lined highway, a officer should not pull over a black motorist traveling a little bit over there are other drivers on the highway traveling at the same speed. A black motorist should never face a greater chance of getting pulled over than a white motorist because they are black. The legal system should treat all citizens the equally, until there is specific, credible evidence that they have committed a crime.

Racial profiling can be used as a easy way out for violators. There are such cases that when a person of a different race besides white, often say the only reason they were pulled over was because they are of a different ethnicity. Black motorists today routinely claim that the only reason that they were pulled over on highway stops was because of their race. Once they are pulled over they claim that the officer's subject them to harassment and time consuming searches. Most of these stories are not true, and when they are taken to court, most of the charges brought against the officer are dropped and said to be lie

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Approximate Word count = 1501
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Politics