Racial Profiling Research Paper

Words: 1186
Pages: 5

The allege use of racial profiling has become a very controversial issue in recent years. There is very little empirical research on this phenomenon and its practices; however, some of the data published has shown that minorities are over-represented at every stage of the phenomenon. This paper seeks to address the practices of racially biased policing, the publics and police perceptions of the phenomenon and also solutions to address the issues of biased-based policing.
Keywords: racial profiling, over-representation of minorities The use of racially bias policing isn’t a new phenomenon, however, there is very little data on its use and practice. A lot of that accounts for the fact that determining that a law enforcement officer used racial
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Instead of using the term racial profiling they preferred racially biased policing, because the term is restrictive and doesn’t fully cover the concerns of the public and the police officers. They found that the term racially biased policing leaves space for constructive conversations and criticism for both the public and law enforcement. “Moreover, one could interpret the common definition of racial profiling to not include activities that are legally supportable in terms of reasonable suspicion or probable cause, but are nonetheless racially biased” (Fridell et al, p. 4). Meaning that measuring traffic stops or simply assessing traffic secondary data to determine bias-based policing occurrences does not fix or test the issues of the …show more content…
this ultimately makes it harder for law enforcement agencies to make connections with the community. “Bias-based policing not only serves to denigrate police-minority relations, but it is an indirect contradiction to our standards of fairness and equality, it is illegal, and it is quite simple, “bad” policing Harris (2002). This represents a larger part of the problem when it comes to policing, for example, the underreporting of crime; people may feel less inclined to contact the police if they don’t feel trust or a strong sense of community police relation. Harris believes that racially biased policing doesn’t work as a crime-fighting tactic, that putting the focus on minorities does not deter or better the odds of stopping crime it, in fact, threatens to destroy the legitimacy of policing and the law