How effective is Racial Profiling?

How effective is Racial Profiling?

Introduction

Racial profiling is any action taken by any person or persons of authority in respect of a person or group of persons, for reasons of safety, security or public protection that relies on factors such as race, color, ethnic or national origin or religion, without real cause or reasonable suspicion, and which has the effect of exposing the person to an examination or differential treatment.

Effectiveness of Racial Profiling

In view of the dichotomy, color blindness/race consciousness is one of the most controversial institutions for anyone concerned with the theme of law and race and is the so-called racial profiling.

The difficulties relate to the racial profiling are manifold. First, it is still not easy to define exactly what is meant by this institution. It entered in Americans dictionaries since 1999. The Oxford American Dictionary and Language Guide define it as "the stated policy of the police to stop and check vehicles driven by persons belonging to certain racial groups." Webster's College Dictionary provides a slightly different definition, but always focused on the relationship between controls in the streets and profiling; under racial profiling is matched - in an incomplete manner - that of "(DWB) driving while black (used ironically to refer to firm drivers of blacks by the police based on race rather than any other real offense)." Some States have regulated (among others are Connecticut, Oklahoma and California) have defined it as "the detention, interdiction or other disparate treatment of an individual solely on the basis of racial or ethnic status of such a person". In most cases, with the expression of racial profiling means the retainer and the search (stop-and-frisk) in roads and airports according to a profile which comprises, as the sole or between other elements. This definition does not capture the entire look of such an institution, while in other contexts; you might see an application of the same principle that inspires racial profiling. Moreover, the shifting boundaries of such an institution also affect cases that the doctrine usually considered as problematic (Jeff, 2010).

Paradigmatic, in this sense, is the situation in which the race is one of the elements of the reconstruction of the identity of a criminal made by a victim or a witness. Richard Banks said that "even the toughest critic of racial profiling approves the use of the descriptions of suspects by the police". However, it cannot be said in an apodictic that the search based on the description is never discriminated. Since description of the suspect and criminal profiling often overlap, it generates confusion about the usefulness and the need to resort to racial profiling. The delicate question of the validity of profiling will not be discussed here as a technique for security investigations. Rather, what is important to highlight is the appearance of racial (and racist) that characterizes racial profiling.

One of the main limits of the debate lies in the analysis of the polarization around the issue of rationality or irrationality of this ...