Racial Profiling In America Analysis

Racial Profiling in America: You Have the Right to Remain Silent
“Racial profiling punishes innocent individuals for the past actions of those who look and sound like them.” This statement made by Benjamin Todd Jealous, previously the president and CEO of the NAACP, captures the ideology of those who oppose law enforcement tactics that are solely based on race. While Dan White argues that surveillance based upon crime rates is perfectly acceptable because certain ethnic groups are more likely to commit crimes than others, he fails to address any of the problems associated with profiling. Profiling based on legitimate crime statistics may actually be an effective way to combat crime, however, because the criminal justice system within the United
Dan White and others believe that because racial profiling is based on statistics, it is a legitimate tactic that should be utilized by law enforcement. New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly states that “96% of individuals who were shot and 90% of those murdered were black or hispanic”(Kelly). Kelly uses this particular statistic to express the sentiment that stop and frisk is protecting the lives of minorities by profiling them. However, his logic is simply flawed because it essentially proclaims that because victims are of a certain race, the perpetrators must automatically be the aforementioned race. Commissioner Kelly’s position seems to lack a basic understanding that black people can kill white people and white people can kill black people. If Commissioner Kelly were to apply this logic to any terror attack in the United States, the group targeted by racial profiling should be white males. And yet, that is not the case. Instead as a nation, America associates terror with muslims and will never have the capacity to associate it with the group actually responsible for majority of tragedy. Whites are a privileged race because even when one of them turns out to be a domestic terrorist, no one will call for them to be
Stop and frisk is prevalent in many major US cities but the New York City Police Department has been known for its particularly violent and discriminatory use of the tactic. Civilians are “menaced out of the blue by the police and forced to spread themselves face down in the street… People who object to the harassment are often threatened with arrest for disorderly conduct” (Herbert). Law enforcement abuse their authority and make this supposed “crime-fighting” tool as miserable as possible for those stopped. These innocent individuals are not treated with respect but rather the with the disregard that convicted criminals likely face. Despite the fact that contraband and weapons are 4 times more likely to be found on whites males stopped (Wise), minorities make up 84% of stops (Herbert). Clearly stop and frisk tactics cannot be adapted to reflect the data that they actually collect. Instead law enforcement must use tactics based on crimes that cannot be battled using stop and frisk. If the main goal of this maneuver is to remove illegal weapons and contraband from the streets of major American cities and the NYPD feels obligated to utilize racial profiling, white males should be stopped in clear proportion to the crimes they are obviously committing. If the main goal of this maneuver is to harass young black and Latino males by the tens of thousands, then there is