Racial Profiling

A recent study by police departments about racial profiling is fueling heated debates across America. While Hispanics, African-Americans and Caucasians are pulled over at the same rate, the former two are arrested over twice as often as their fairer-skinned counterparts.

However, in my opinion, racial profiling is not limited to any one race. Racial profiling is a crime-based classification of phenotypes or characteristics that evidence suggests have a higher likelihood of revealing a criminal. Think back to Virginia Tech. The reason Cho Seung-Hui wasn’t caught early on was because of the racial profile of a school serial killer: a white male. This profiling is no different for inner-city crimes, mafia-related crimes, arson or any other serious crime.

There are shortcuts to getting the believed-felon within the time constraints set by the vengeful public, and one of those shortcuts is called “racial profiling.” Most of the serial killers we’ve seen, especially at schools, have been Caucasian males, so is it really so strange that police would be more suspicious of white males in such a situation? In the city there are many drug- and gang-related crimes, and who are the typical perpetrators of such violence? I submit to you that it is African-Americans and Hispanics. In the cases of rape and child molestation we tend to think of Caucasians, especially on college campuses and in the Catholic Church, respectively. And none of the aforementioned groups are often accused of being terrorists; that’s reserved for Arabs.

So we must ask ourselves two questions: 1) Is racial profiling really so unfair? and 2) What can we do to change it? Race has nothing to do with the propensity to commit crime, but when the vast majority of the perpetrators of a crime fall inside a single race, it greatly impacts the decision-making process.