Racial Profiling

Racial Profiling

Racial Profiling

Introduction

Perhaps one of the more perplexing issues facing the criminal justice system today is the allegation that some contemporary police practices are motivated by bias and racism. Some observers have accused the police of systematically stopping minority motorists simply because of the color their skin, while the police themselves emphatically deny these allegations. The United States Commission on Civil Rights (2000) set forth recommendations to improve the quality of police protection while ensuring the protection of civil rights for all Americans. Within the commission's report they asserted that the issue of racial profiling remains the highest priority and they recommended the enactment of legislation to prosecute violators and increased efforts to eliminate its practice in all law enforcement activities.

For some time, anecdotal evidence had suggested that many minorities believed that the police routinely stopped and searched them because of the color of their skin (Harris, 2002 and Weitzer and Tuch, 2002). Such anecdotal evidence was often dismissed as isolated experiences of angry, overly sensitive, or disgruntled minorities. Some statistical evidence, however, tends to confirm the anecdotal accounts of minority citizens that they are indeed being singled out for traffic stops and searches. Antonovics and Knight (2004) reviewed vehicle search data from the Boston Police Department. They discovered that more than 43 percent of all searches were of African-American motorists even though they represented only 33 percent of the cars that were stopped by the police. A study in Ohio found that Blacks were twice more likely to be stopped by the police than non-Blacks. In the study, traffic citation information was examined from four of the largest municipal court systems in Ohio. It was discovered that in Akron, African Americans received 37.6 percent of all citations for moving violations; in Toledo, they received 31 percent; in Dayton, the number was 50 percent; and in Franklin County, which includes Columbus, the figure was 25.2 percent (Harris, 1999).

In San Diego, African-Americans and Hispanic drivers were found to be overrepresented in vehicle stops. African-American drivers had about a 60 percent greater chance of being stopped by the police when compared to Whites, and Hispanic drivers about a 37 percent of being stopped (Cordner, Williams, & Velasco, 2002). Other studies had reported similar disparities in stops and searches of minority citizens by police authorities (Covington, 2001, Engel and Calnon, 2004a, Schmitt et al., 2002 and Withrow, 2002).

The general scholarship on the United States criminal justice system offers evidence of a long history of not only racial, but also cultural and class group biases in its administration (Farrell and Swigert, 1978, Pope and McNeely, 1981 and Yates, 1995). The authors point to one of the many examples of racial bias in the case of Furman v. Georgia (1972) in which the Supreme Court ruled the death penalty to be cruel and unusual punishment. In the Furman case, the Burger Court underscored the possibility of discrimination against African-Americans in the imposition of the death ...