Racial Profiling & Police Ethics

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Racial Profiling & Police Ethics

Introduction

Race-based policing, sometimes referred to as racial profiling, is best described as a practice whereby a police officer makes a law enforcement decision, for example, a decision to stop a motorist, primarily on the basis of the motorist's race or ethnicity. During the last years of the twentieth century, serious charges of racism were leveled against some of the nation's largest police departments because of the disparity that exists between the proportion of minority drivers in a population and the proportion of minorities that are stopped, searched, or issued a traffic citation. There is a growing perception that some police officers are highly and inappropriately influenced by the race or ethnicity of the driver when making a decision to stop a vehicle and then, subsequent to the stop, conduct a search of the vehicle (Weitzer, Ronald & Steven , 2002).

Literature Review

Race-Based Policing

One of the issues of public interest and research facing police executives today is the concern of race as a significant factor which makes the police make the decision to question a vehicle and, in some cases, search vehicle and its occupants. The public calls more this kind of behavior "racial profiling". Today, there is a highly publicized debate on the existence of racial discrimination. In general, it seems that any definition of racial profiling should comprise two elements - the first usually indicates that people are arrested because of their belonging to a category of the population, and the second notes that the police must have a certain degree of suspicion keeping an eye of the offender's race to stop them (Walker, Cassia

& Miriam, 1996).

There is relative consensus in the findings of previous and current research in police studies that vehicle drivers of different races receive disparate treatment from the police. Across various jurisdictions, from New Jersey, Maryland, Missouri, Michigan, and San Diego, officers appear to be disproportionately targeting drivers of different races for official post-stop activities such as field interrogations, searches, and sanctions in the form of citations. Furthermore, it has been reported that black motorists are more likely to be stopped for nonmoving violations, highly suggestive of equipment violations as a pretext for searches and general harassment. If such disparities in the application of the law and coercive actions of the state are supported by official statistics, then citizens' perceptions of such disparities and their prevalence are given additional support. These types of encounters, directly and indirectly, when accumulated over time, are likely to further entrench the siege mentality between the police and the public, while eroding support of the police and trust in formal criminal justice institutions.

Reasons behind the disparity refer to the practice of race-based deployment strategies, where assignment of officers to segregated areas results in a differential stratification of enforcement, the homogenous racial composition leading to an imbalance in the outcomes of activities (minorityjobs).

Other explanations posit racial discrimination for the inequitable treatment that persons of color receive from the (white) ...