Racial Profiling

Racial Profiling

The problem of racial profiling is that law enforcement people such as cops can profile certain people because of their race. All races are being effected by this but the main ones are Hispanics, African Americans and Middle Easterners. The cause of this problem is crime rate rising and racism. Law enforcement tries to control and prevent this from happening but is hard to narrow it down. The reason it hasn’t be completely avoided is because its hard to tell if an officer stopped a person because of their race or ethnicity.  If this problem doesn’t get fixed, we as people will soon segregate and a nation that is know as the mixing pot due to all the races and ethnicity, will no longer be known for that.

Topic Freewrite

Racial Profiling: A Survey of African American Police Officers

            In this article, author David E. Barlow speaks about how racial profiling is a problem in law enforcement. He states “In certain patrol areas around Milwaukie blacks were overrepresented then other racial and ethnic groups.” Barlow also speaks about how it is so hard to prevent this kind of stuff from happening. Even if someone feels like they have been pulled over or whatever the case may be due to racial profiling, there is no exact way to prove it. The author also states “Findings imply racial disparity at the level of individual stops may be substantially explained by different policing strategies.” There for it usually goes un-dealt with or is not able to be proven.

Precis

In the article "A Survey of African American Profiling" The author explains an effort to provide data on racial profiling that are not as easily dismissed as anecdotal accounts of individual motorists. The authors conducted a survey of African American police officers in the Milwaukee Police Department in Wisconsin regarding their personal experiences of having been racially profiled, defining racial profiling as any situation in which race is used by a police officer or agency to determine the potential criminality of an individual. This study was not an investigation of the Milwaukee Police Department or of racial profiling within the department but rather of the extent to which Black police officers perceive they have been subjected to racial profiling by any police officer or agency. Police officers understand the intricacies, strategies, and techniques of law enforcement. Therefore, the observations of Black police officers on the reasonableness of situations in which they have been stopped by police have exceptional validity.