Robert Dongell
English 52
July 25, 2013
Profiling
Say you are walking down the street and a police officer pulls you over and attempts to search you. His only reason for doing so is that the area you happen to be walking in is known to have gang involved robberies and you just happen to fit the race. Is it fair to be stopped and searched for the color of your skin? Is it even right to judge someone by the way they dress, walk, talk, or even move? Maybe in some cases it makes sense, and then there are cases where people are targeted based of off another's racism. The definition of profiling as described by dictionary.com is “the use of personal characteristics or behavior patterns to make generalizations about a person, as in gender profiling” and, “the use of these characteristics to determine whether a person may be engaged in illegal activity, as in racial profiling . There are many different reasons why its done and many reason when its unacceptable. The term “Profiling” started during the late 1970's and in 1985 the DEA started operation “Pipeline.” The operation was originally started in attempt to stop drugs from transporting to the drug markets. The program involved training state and local police different profiling techniques to find possible drug traffickers. Those techniques involved looking for age, race and ethnicity. Profiling has been done for hundreds of years; in 1514 King Charles forced Native Americans to either submit to the Spanish authority and convert to Roman Catholicism or, death. In 1642 a man named John Elkin confessed he killed Yowocomoco, an American Indian leader. John had four trials to finally be charged with manslaughter. The first three he got away because his fellow colonist refused to punish a white man for killing an Indian.
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