Analysis of Racial Profiling in Police Stops

Solution Preview

The Innocence Commission: Preventing Wrongful Convictions and Restoring the Criminal Justice System. Publisher: NYU Press (November 1, 2009). Jon B. Gould

Analysis of Racial Profiling in Police Stops

Impact of the Challenge on the System and Society

Racial profiling and police stops is endemic and systemic in the American Criminal "Injustice" system as racism continues to play a large role in profiling, which in and within itself is a form of racism. Profiling involves the use of preconceived notions and assumptions that are used to stop and harass a certain group of people while not applying these assumptions to other groups. In America, minorities are profiled and stopped disproportionally while whites are not. This is the gist of profiling in America as most African American males, no matter if they are a Doctor or a college student or a drug dealer has been profiled in America. The profiling emanates from the view that Blacks are more prone to violence, which is a racist and false view, but because it is systemic throughout the entire system, it has impacted the entire system and resulted not only in racial profiling in police stops but throughout the entire criminal justice system. Profiling occurs during stops, arrests, prosecution, and incarceration for minority offenders.

Historical Response to the Challenge and Strategies

Historically, the response to racial profiling has been to either cover it up with police departments refusing to acknowledge that they engage in it wide scale or for the federal government to order change by monitoring departments until racial profiling is deemed to have been eradicated. The federal government has the ability to use its Civil Rights legislation to force states' to refrain from engaging in racial profiling when it's deemed that the police department will not refrain from the practice on their own accord.

Effectiveness of the Current Response

The effectiveness of the current response has been limited as for racial profiling to end, the department has to engage in recruiting a diverse police department and eradicating the notion that it's okay to profile certain citizens based off of false assumptions. The use of community policing has been somewhat of a deterrent to racial profiling, but New York City's racist and egregious policy of stop and frisk illustrates the perils of ending racial profiling. A supposedly liberal democrat was the main champion of this policy while mayor of New York yet over 800,000 African American males were profiled and searched just for being Black or Hispanic. This is the fallacy of the policy as it enables wide scale abuse of civil rights to catch a minute few of ...