Racial Profiling

What are your thoughts on racial profiling? Do you feel it can be an efficient, effective, and fair way for law enforcement officers to prevent crime? Why or why not?

I believe that people should never be subject to suspicion simply because of what they look like. I feel that all law enforcement should react when someone is truly breaking the law, and only when someone is breaking the law. I think racial profiling is not only unconstitutional, but it is also morally wrong. Stopping someone or questioning someone based on “suspicious activity”, goes against everything I believe in. You do not see high percentage of these types of stops, in that of whites. To back up that statement, I have included some data from various studies.

A New Jersey study reported that while black and Hispanic motorists made up only 13.5 percent of the drivers on that states highway patrol, they represented 73.2 percent of those stopped and searched by the New Jersey State Patrol. Another study in four large Ohio cities revealed that black motorists are two to three times as likely to be ticketed as white motorists. Yet another study, by the American Civil Liberties Union in Illinois, showed that, although Hispanics make up less than 8 percent of the state’s population, they were 27 percent of those stopped and searched by a highway drug interdiction unit.

In several situations, lawsuits have been filed claiming racial profiling in police stops.

Some officials assert that their disproportionately higher stop rates and arrest rates for racial minority groups do not, in fact, reflect the factoring of race into their decisions making regarding whom to stop, question, detain, search, and arrest. They claim to be focusing on factors other than race in their decision making such as suspicious activity. According to a recent survey conducted on all the state police/highway patrol agencies, it was found that whether a state