Racial Profiling Essay

998 Words4 Pages
Racial Profiling Racism unfortunately has been a huge part of our nations history, and racial profiling stems from this racist history. “Racial profiling is the police practice of focusing on members of particular race groups for extra surveillance. The most common example of racial profiling is traffic stops of young, Black men, and it appears to be most commonly employed as a drug-trafficking interdiction strategy” (Glaser 2006, 396). Some law enforcement claim that racial profiling serves a legitimate purpose in protecting security, but in my opinion all it does is cause an unproportional amount of minorities; mainly Black males, to be incarcerated. Racial profiling does exist, and I believe is quite prevalent, whether it’s a Black male being pulled over for no apparent reason, or someone of Middle-Eastern descent being “randomly” checked at an airport, racial profiling is definitely used. The idea behind racial profiling is that by targeting the groups of people that have higher crime rates, more criminals will be caught. But it is because of this racial profiling that these certain groups of people are determined to have higher crime rates and commit more crime. Law enforcements solution to protecting public safety by racial profiling only extenuates the idea that a certain group of people commit more crime than another group. In my opinion racial profiling doesn’t serve any legitimate purpose in catching more criminals. “According to the Public Health Service, approximately 70% of drug users are white, 15% are black, and 8% are Latino. But the Department of Justice reports that among those imprisoned on drug charges, 26% are white, 45% are black, and 21% are Latino” (Head, 2011). Not only does racial profiling in fact not have any legitimate effect on catching more criminals, but it also has a negative effect. Racial profiling can divide a community, it can
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