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What is racial profiling? Depending on whom the person asked, some might say that it is the profiling of someone for a crime based on their race, while others might say that it does not exist. The term racial profiling is not precisely in the dictionary, but according to the Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, the term profiling, specifically for racial profiling, means “the act of suspecting or targeting a person on the basis of observed characteristics or behavior” (Merriam-Webster). The misconception and miscommunication on profiling, its true meaning, and intended purpose have led to the ethical dilemma and current-day social issue of racism seen in profiling. Racial profiling has been abused and implemented in many different situations and …show more content…
Police have used profiling for years, but the fine line between criminal profiling and racial profiling seems to have been blurred by the police. The lack of differentiation between the two in our current society has led to this ethical dilemma of racial profiling prevailing. Profiling based on race is not ethical as it is purposeful and done with malicious intent; it harms the people targeted by it, and the offenders go unpunished due to racism.

Profiling based on race has been around since the end of slavery, as the premise of today’s police force was blueprinted and first enforced in the 1700s. “The origins of modern-day policing can be traced back to the "Slave Patrol." The earliest formal slave patrol was created in the Carolinas in the early 1700s with one mission: to establish a system of terror and squash slave uprisings with the capacity to pursue, apprehend, and return runaway slaves to their owners. Tactics included the use of excessive force to control and produce desired slave behavior” (“The Origins of Modern Day Policing”). The police force has come far in its progression into the officers that we are familiar with today, but the underlying biased views of some officers are still there. Current-day racial …show more content…
African Americans are not only profiled in the store, but also during traffic stops. “A new study, undertaken by Ravi Shroff, an assistant professor holding joint appointments at NYU Steinhardt and NYU CUSP, and his colleagues at the Stanford Open Policing Project, found that in a dataset of nearly 100 million traffic stops across the United States, black drivers were about 20 percent more likely to be stopped than white drivers relative to their share of the residential population. The study also found that once stopped, black drivers were searched about 1.5 to 2 times as often as white drivers, while they were less likely to be carrying drugs, guns, or other illegal contraband compared to their white peers. Shroff and his colleagues also measured the disparity in stop rates before and after sunset. They found that black drivers made up a smaller share of those stopped at night, when it’s more difficult to discern the race of a driver, which suggests that racial bias may influence stop decisions. For example, in Texas, about 25 percent of drivers stopped right before sunset were black, compared to about 20 percent just after dusk. The analysis found the same basic pattern

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