Racial Profiling: Overview

Introduction

Racial profiling is a law enforcement and security agency practice that encourages officers to stop, search, and investigate people based on race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion. While racial profiling is most commonly committed against ethnic minorities, many instances of racial profiling occur in reaction to specific crimes, making any racial or cultural group subject to more intensive scrutiny by the authorities.

The debate concerning racial profiling mostly deals with the question of whether or not racial profiling exists, and not whether it is good or bad to use racial profiling. People who believe that racial profiling exists condemn it as poor practice on the part of police that unfairly targets certain ethnic or cultural groups. Others deny the existence of racial profiling and suggest that in specific instances, targeting groups, neighborhoods, or organizations is simply good investigative technique, and that race is one of many possible criteria that police and security officers can use to narrow down a pool of suspects.

Understanding the Discussion

Civil liberties: Civil rights, especially those that protect freedom of speech, religion, and the right to privacy, that protect individuals from interference from the government.

"DW [term]": "Driving while [insert term here]." A common slang term used to describe racial profiling in English-speaking countries by groups who feel targeted by the police during traffic stops. Examples include "DWB: Driving while Black or Brown" in the United States and Canada; in Britain, "DWA: Driving while Asian" (Asian in this case meaning people from India and Pakistan), and in many countries, "DWM: Driving while Muslim."

Pseudoscience: Practices that resemble experimental science, but in fact have little basis in fact or are largely unproven through experimentation.

Stop and search: Also "stop and frisk"; the short term for the police practice of stopping motorists, asking for their registration and identification, and demanding their cars be searched. Stop and searches are most commonly used to search for illegal drugs or guns.

History

Since the beginning of history, human beings have noted differences between one another. When one set of people came into power, they would most likely discriminate against groups that were less powerful or different. Human beings naturally ascribe qualities to those unlike themselves. Identifying differences evolved into a number of pseudosciences that were used to justify discriminating against people of other races and cultures.

Racial profiling has its origins in the nineteenth century, when many scientists in Europe and America tried to prove that people of certain physiques bore positive and negative personality traits that matched their physical features. Many pseudosciences arose that measured the facial features, skin color, and other physical characteristics of people of different races and ethnicities and claimed to tie these characteristics to personality traits. Some scientists theorized that non-whites had physical characteristics that indicated they were less intelligent or more criminal than whites. No data existed to support these theories, but law enforcement agencies accepted them and used them to justify targeting people of particular ethnic origins. For example, Jewish people were among the targets of racial profiling, as it was generally believed that they were more prone to criminal activity because of their large noses. Such stereotypes seem ridiculous today, but at that time, very few people questioned them.

Racial profiling became common practice against other minorities as well: United States law enforcement agencies targeted black and Chinese people in most urban areas because it was generally believed these two groups were criminal by nature. Such discrimination continued well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, although the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s called into question the practices of law enforcement agencies.

Racial profiling became illegal when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 guaranteed equal treatment of minorities under federal law. It was determined that the practice violated the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees protection against unlawful search and seizure. However, many members of minority groups complained that such practices continued, though not blatantly as they had before. They particularly insisted that police officers stopped and searched minorities and targeted minority-dominated neighborhoods far more often than those of whites. Black people in the United States and Canada called the practice "DWB: Driving While Black or Brown," and the term became a popular way to describe racial discrimination practiced by the police.

Many European countries, while not making amendments to their constitutions, officially ended racial profiling through other means. Still, ethnic and religious minorities complained of continued discrimination at the hands of police departments and other agencies. These departments and agencies denied that they used racial profiling, and very few departments provided statistics that supported or denied the existence of racial profiling.

After the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, Muslims and South Asians in North America and Europe complained that they were unfairly stopped and searched and were targeted for questioning at airports by security agencies. (Muslims are not of any single ethnic or racial group but do tend to wear specific attire for religious reasons, making them a visible minority.) Few security agencies denied the fact that they placed people they believed to be Muslim under greater scrutiny, but they insisted that this did not concern racial profiling and instead was solid investigative practice in response to the attacks, as they were searching specifically for Muslim terrorism suspects. Claims of discrimination spread to other parts of the world: Muslims in India claimed to be the targets of greater scrutiny by the police, and Muslim minorities in China also complained of increased scrutiny and oppression.

A 2001 study conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) stated that 55 percent of whites and 83 percent of African Americans polled in the United States believe that racial profiling exists and is a problem. An analysis by the United Kingdom's Equality and Human Rights Commission of national police-collected data for 2011–12 showed that on average, blacks were stopped and searched as much as six times more often than whites. Studies conducted in the United States and Canada have shown similar results, although the statistics were not generated by the police departments and were criticized for introducing potential bias in their results.

In July 2010, a federal judge blocked the most controversial elements of an Arizona state immigration law known as SB 1070 from taking effect. Among these were included a stipulation that granted law enforcement the right to search and question individuals they suspected of being undocumented immigrants. Critics of the law stated that this portion of the law essentially sanctioned the racial profiling of people of Mexican and Latin heritage in the state of Arizona. Racial profiling persisted in Arizona, however. In 2013, a federal judge ruled that Maricopa County Sheriff's Office (MCSO) traffic patrols targeted immigrants and profiled Latinos. The judgment led to the overhaul of MCSO traffic operations and internal affairs. Arpaio defied court orders and continued the patrols, however, before being voted out of office in 2016. He was found guilty of misdemeanor contempt of court charges for refusing to stop the patrols but was pardoned by then president Donald Trump in 2017.

In 2015, the federal government instituted new guidelines regarding racial profiling, applying only to federal entities and not local police forces. These extended the rules against profiling to include religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity and removing the exemption for matters of national security. However, attempts to remove the exemption for immigration cases received heavy opposition from the Department of Homeland Security, and in the end that exemption remained in effect. Critics argued that many areas of the United States that are close to the border with Mexico have large Hispanic populations already, and that therefore whether an individual looks Latino is not a reliable indicator of undocumented immigration and the ability to single people out based on their racial or ethnic background would not actually make border officials’ jobs easier.

Profiling, racial or otherwise, as a police tactic became a subject of renewed debate during the course of the 2016 presidential election. A December 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, a June 2016 mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, and September 2016 bombings in New York and New Jersey were perpetrated by Muslim Americans with extremist ideologies. Following those incidents, Republican candidate Donald Trump recommended increased profiling of Muslims as a means to combat terrorism. Although he did not use the term "profiling" himself, Trump cited the profiling done in Israel as an example of successful policy and advocated for such measures as surveillance of and possible closure of mosques, community cooperation in identifying suspects, and a ban on Muslim visitors to the United States. During the September 2016 general election debate, Trump stated that in order to handle crime nationally, he would expand the New York City policy of stop-and-frisk, which had already been deemed unconstitutional in 2013 for having systematically and disproportionately targeted black and Latino young men. Trump's remarks and proposals fuelled renewed debate about what methods the country's law enforcement should take to protect citizens from harm and to protect civil liberties.

In 2017, the Trump administration issued new directives to Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agents saying that the US government will “no longer will exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement.” This was a reversal of 2014 guidelines that placed the highest priority for deportations on gang members, felons, and those who posed security threats. Also in 2017, President Trump issued an executive order called “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States” that empowered state and local law enforcement agencies to perform the functions of an immigration officer in the interior of the United States. This move drew criticism that it would encourage police officers to racially profile individuals in their jurisdictions. That November, a US District Court judge issued a permanent injunction against the executive order and President Joe Biden rescinded it upon taking office in 2021.

Racial Profiling Today

In 2021, members of the Asian American community in Siskiyou County, California, reported a range of racial profiling incidents. Several members of the community reported being harassed or stopped by law enforcement while driving. Farmers of Hmong and Chinese descent reported that they were racially profiled and had faced disproportionate enforcement of county water and cannabis ordinances passed that May, which they alleged had effectively cut off their access to water. A group of Asian American county residents sued the county in 2021 over the water ordinances. The following year, another group Asian American plaintiffs brought a class-action lawsuit against Siskiyou County that accused county officials of large-scale anti-Hmong harassment, restriction of water rights, unlawful traffic stops, and illegal search and seizure. While people of Asian descent comprised 2.4 percent of the population, the suit stated, they represented 28 percent of traffic stops by the county's sheriff's department in 2021. In August 2023, the Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors repealed two of the water ordinances as part of the settlement of the class-action suit.

In March 2022, New York City Mayor Eric Adams brought back anti-crime units that had been disbanded in 2020 after they and they were found to have committed a disproportionate number of police shootings. Rebranded as "neighborhood safety teams," the units re-introduced stop-and-frisk policing and racial profiling. According to court-appointed monitor Mylan L. Denerstein, 97 percent of stops made by the units she analyzed were of Black or Hispanic people and 24 percent of the stops were unconstitutional. Denerstein also discovered that a few precincts had even higher rates of unconstitutional stops, frisks, and searches. Mayor Adams, along with other city and police officials, disputed Denerstein's conclusions and argued that the units' interactions with the public were lawful and had caused the number of shooting incidents to drop by double digits.

In May 2023 the Associated Press reported that taxpayers in metro Phoenix, Arizona, were continuing to pay for ongoing costs of monitoring the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office for compliance with court-ordered measures to overhaul internal affairs and stop racial profiling. Though the agency had improved under court supervision, it was still not fully compliant. Taxpayer costs were expected to reach more than a quarter of a billion dollars by mid-2024.

Also in May 2023, Florida lawmakers enacted the state's Senate Bill 264 (SB 264), championed by Republican governor Ron DeSantis, which went into effect that July. The law prohibited people of Chinese descent who were not US citizens or permanent residents from buying property in Florida. The law made an exception for asylees and those with non-tourist visas, who could purchase a single residential property of less than two acres, as long as that property was five miles away from military installations and critical infrastructure facilities. Given that Florida has twenty-one military bases, much of the state, including its major cities and metropolitan areas, were off-limits to such buyers. The law was also required individuals and businesses affiliated with the People's Republic of China or the Chinese Communist Party to register their property with the state. Advocates for Asian American civil rights protested what they referred to as the state's "alien land law," saying that it was racist, unconstitutional, and likely to lead to anti-Asian racial profiling because property buyers and sellers who broke the law were subject to fines and imprisonment. The American Civil Liberties Union and other law advocates, representing a group of Chinese immigrants, challenged the law in court in Shen v. Simpson. In February 2024, an appeals court temporarily halted enforcement of the law while the case proceeded.

By September 2023, at least five Black plaintiffs filed different lawsuits against law enforcement departments and officials, alleging that they had been misidentified by facial recognition technology and subsequently wrongfully arrested or jailed. The lawsuits included three filed against Detroit police and one against officials in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. Critics of the technology say that it misidentifies people of color at a higher rate than it misidentifies White people, and some jurisdictions have limited its use by law enforcement. Supporters of the technology claim that it has greatly aided the solving of drug dealing, murder, missing persons, and human trafficking cases, the apprehension of criminals, and the rescue and recovery of crime victims.

These essays and any opinions, information or representations contained therein are the creation of the particular author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of EBSCO Information Services.

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