Racial Profiling
Racial profiling is the act of targeting an individual due to their race, gender, and ethnicity. Police officers engage in racial profiling when falsely accusing innocent individuals of committing crimes. The individuals who are most likely to be targeted are people of color, such as Hispanics and African American. For example, New York has practiced a law that allows police officers to frisk any individual on the street for anything. Police officers don’t need a concrete reason to frisk them. They can go based on assumptions. And it is legal. Bob Herbert in his article, Jim Crow Policing, talks in detail about the “Stop and Frisk” Law in New York City and how it affects different ethnicities. The general argument
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However, it has seemed that whites were committing crimes that police officers assumed these blacks or Hispanics would do without being stopped or given any sort of punishment. And statistics have shown that whites that have a higher percentage of contraband compared to minorities. Whites don’t usually receive consequences. Their actions seem to be justified. And police officers don’t seem to point the finger to white. I believe racial profiling should not be accepted in today’s society because racial profiling has been used to harass innocent individuals for committing crimes that police officers assumed that these individuals committed due solely to their race, gender, and ethnicity.
Although police officers believe that racial profiling has helped make the United States a safer environment, racial profiling has been shown as an act of discrimination. Police officers have targeted mostly the minorities of committing crimes without clear and concrete evidence. They have only accused individuals of crimes based on assumptions. For example, a black scholar, Henry Louis Gates Jr., was arrested for forcing his way into his own home in the city of Cambridge. Gates tried to explain that the house that he was breaking into was his home. In the article, Arrest of Harvard's Henry Louis