Argument Against Racial Profiling

Words: 1966
Pages: 8

Racial Profiling
Assume one is walking around in your neighborhood at night and they pass by a black man or woman. Automatically, they become more conscious of their surroundings and pass by as quickly as possible. But if this were a white person, one may still be cautious but the level of alertness will not be as high. This instinctive action is caused by racism, sometimes unconsciously. This unconscious reflex is also present within the police and government processes to find potential threats, which is known as racial profiling. Racial profiling is the process in which law enforcers use a person’s race or religion to narrow down their suspects for a certain crime, or can also be known as “a tool of oppression dressed up as a tool of law enforcement” (Maguire).
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For one, racial profiling does not always work. While it does work occasionally or actually leads to the person in question, majority of the time it proves to be an unsuccessful process. In this time that the law enforcement tries to find people who fit their description according to race, people's lives could be in danger. In 2002, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo caused what is known as the Beltway Sniper Attacks. Over the span of 10 months, these two men were killed 17 people and injured 10 people. At the times of these attacks, “police were looking for a white male. Everyone thought it would be a white male. But as it turns out, he was black” (Cohn). Although racial profiling does usually target minorities, Whites can be a target of it as well. Law enforcers assumed that they were looking for a white male based on statistics of the snipers that were in the area. By only focusing on the White population, they crossed off the race of the actual sniper.If they had kept the pool bigger, they could have found the snipers in a shorter amount of time and even could have saved the lives of these two men’s