Racial Profiling Essay Example for Free

racial Profiling EssayOn February 4, 1999, Amadou Di all(prenominal)(prenominal)o, an unarm 22 year-old immigrant from newfangled Guinea, West Africa, was shot and killed in the narrow vestibule of the apartment building where he lived. Four neat officers, Sean Carroll, Kenneth Boss, Edward McMellon and Richard Murphy fired 41 bullets, hitting Diallo 19 times. All four were members of the cutting York City Police Departments Street Crimes Unit, which, under the slogan, We Own the Night, used aggressive stop and f adventure evasive carry out against Afri basin- Americans at a rate double that conventions population percent era. A report on the unit by the state attorney general found that blacks were stopped at a rate 10 times that of whites, and that 35 percent of those stops lacked reasonable suspicion to detain or had reports insufficiently filled step to the fore to make a determination. Thousands attended Diallos funeral. Demonstrations were held almost daily, along with the arrests of over 1,200 people in planned cultured disobedience. In a trial that was moved out of the community where Diallo lived and to Albany in upstate New York, the four officers who killed Diallo were acquitted of all charges (The Diallo online).Racial Profiling is any practice of law force or private protective cover practice in which a person is treated as a suspect because of his or her race, ethnicity, nationality or religion. This occurs when police investigate, stop, frisk, search or use force against a person based on much(prenominal) characteristics instead of evidence of a persons criminal behavior. It often involves the stopping and searching of people of color for merchandise violations, known as DWB or driving while black or brown. (Meeks 17). After 9/11, racial profile has become widely accepted as an appropriate form of crime pr pull downtion.People were gatherk after based solely on the fact that they were of Arab descent. But racial profiling d id not cabbage with September 11th racial profiling has been around for ages. Tracy Maclin, a professor at Boston University shoal of Law, says that racial profiling can trace its historical roots back to a time in archaeozoic American society when speak to officials in cities like Philadelphia permitted constables and ordinary citizens the right to take up all black persons seen gadding abroad without their masters permission. (Meeks 164).The term profiling first became associated with faithfulness enforcements nterference in medicine trafficking during the late 1970s. In 1985, the Drug Enforcement Administration instituted Operation Pipeline, an intelligence-based assessment of the method by which drug networks transported peck drugs to drug markets, and began train local and state police in take foring a drug courier indite as part of highway drug interdiction techniques. Under Operation Pipeline, police were trained to apply a profile that included evidence of concea lment in the vehicle, indications of fast, point-to-point driving, as well as the age and race characteristics of the probable drivers.In most cases, the profiling technique was distorted, so that officers began targeting black and Hispanic phallic drivers by stopping them for technical traffic violations as a pretext for determining whether or not drivers were carrying drugs (Weitzer 133). A 1998 Department of Justice investigation of these practices raised aw beness of this issue and defined racial profiling as the practice of singling out members of racial or ethnic groups for relatively minor traffic or petty criminal offenses in order to question and/or search them for drugs, guns, or other smuggled (History 1).In 1999, the American Civil Liberties Union launched a nationwide campaign against racial profiling, authorise Arrest the Racism Racial Profiling in America. This campaign included investigate, phone hotlines to report incidents, online disorder forms, advertising campaigns that included radio, television, print and billboards, advocacy for legislation, and a communications program synchronized with litigation efforts crosswise the country. This campaign has inspired a movement against racial profiling by local, state and national organizations. union organizations nonplus been involved in advocating for legislation, increasing visibility of their racial profiling concerns, and encouraging police departments to vex info assemblage. More than 20 states adjudge passed legislation prohibiting racial profiling and/or mandating data collection on stops and searches, hundreds of individual legal powers have voluntarily begun to collect data, and several jurisdictions are collecting data on racial profiling as a result of federal or state court settlements or consent decrees.In February 2001, during an address to a joint session of Congress, President George W.Bush state of racial profiling, It is wrong and we will end it in America. (History 1) California, alone, has enacted legislation which mandates sensitivity training, but on that point is currently no legislation mandating data collection. In 1999, Governor Gray Davis vetoed legislation that would have essential law enforcement agencies to collect data to show whether people of color are stopped by police at disproportionate rates. Bills that would have prohibited racial profiling and required data collection every died on inactive file or had important content removed before world passed.A large number of individual jurisdictions are collecting data either voluntarily, through court settlements, or through federal consent decrees. S. B. 205, which amended the California Penal Code section 13519. 4, entitled Racial and Cultural Diversity Training, defines racial profiling as the practice of detaining a suspect based on a broad set of criteria which casts suspicion on an entire class of people without any tell suspicion of the particular person being stopped. This legislation outlines the inappropriateness of racial profiling, and mandates cultural awareness training for civil servants.The federal code which is used to address racial profiling and other questionable procedures is agnomen 42, U. S. C. , Section 14141, which makes it unlawful for state or local law enforcement agencies to allow officers to engage in a pattern or practice of conduct that deprives persons of rights protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States. This law is commonly referred to as the Police Misconduct Statute. This law gives the Department of Justice the right to reprimand and/or sanction law enforcement agencies that use policies or practices which support a pattern of misconduct by officers.The action taken by the department is directed against the agency as a whole, not against individual officers. Although efforts have been made to ban the use of racial profiling as a law enforcement tool, no jurisdiction in the U. S. has addressed the occ upation in a way that is both effective and all-inclusive. Currently, twenty-nine states have passed laws concerning racial profiling, but state and federal protections against this problem continue to be extremely lacking.Further, some states are even passing legislation that supports racial profiling, such as Arizonas new SB 1070, which aims to curb the problem of illegal entry into the U.S. While immigration issues continue to be a problem in the U. S. , this law basically allows law enforcement officials to stop any citizen randomly to verify their legal habitation in the country. Police practices that are viewed as racially motivated will ultimately lead to more(prenominal) frequent and severe interactions with law enforcement, and eventually leads to a distrust of the police. This is an unhealthy position, as law enforcement practices arent effective when you are fearful of those whose job is to protect and serve the citizens (Blumer 4).There is not much research available t hat addresses the question of why racial differences exist in citizens relations with the police. Part of the explanation can be found in the group-position thesis, which is discussed in the research by Bob Hutchings 64), and states the group-position thesis focuses on inter-group contender over material rewards, status, and power. Racial attitudes which reflect individual-level feelings and beliefs also mirror a collective sense of group cohesion, unlike other racial groups.These perceptions include (1) perceived threats plethoric group members fears that their group is at risk of losing privileges or resources to competing racial groups, and (2) perceived advantages minority group members beliefs that their group interests will be enhanced by challenging the prevailing racial order. The group-position thesis has been used to explain inter-group racial attitudes. The thesis further outlines the entitlement of overabundant groups to resources, and the attraction to institutions that serve their interests an example of this would be the attraction of the White race to the criminal justice system.The police are often seen as allies by the dominant ethnic group, especially in deeply divided societies where the police can be used as an instrument for suppressing subordinate groups (Bobo umpireire Hutchings 70). This relationship between the police and dominant groups is less obvious in more democratic societies, but the authors state that even in these societies, the superior group builds strong relations with the police. In the United States, white peoples support for the police has traditionally been strong and, at the same time, whites tend to see racial minorities as inclined to criminal or violent behavior. In the 2000 General Social Survey, for example, fractional of whites viewed blacks as violence-prone. (Weitzer ump Tuch 1021) For whites who follow these views, there is a tendency to condone police suspicion and disparate treatment of minorities as rational discrimination (Weitzer 153). These attitudes may be more strongly held by some whites than by others, but the group-position thesis predicts that these views are fairly common throughout the white population (Bobo ump Hutchings 72).Racial profiling has been occurring throughout our nation, and even the world, for as far back as any of us can remember. Racial profiling stems from racism, and fear of people who are different, ethnically and culturally, than the person making the judgments. Sadly, it spreads even further than that, and clouds the judgment of the people who are in positions of authority, even when they come from the same ethnic background.Racism, classism, sexism and all the other isms combine to create trends such as these, which affect more than just the person being judged it affects their families, friends, neighborhoods, communities, etc. Like all other issues that deal with the problem of isms, the only way to change the dominant perception is to change the way people are programmed throughout life and their experiences. Until that day, no legislation or rule is going to change the way people feel about the minority, or perceived get class, group.