Examples Of Criminal Profiling

Racial Profiling or Criminal Profiling

When thinking of policing, one must understand the day-to-day struggles that a police officer faces. Every day police officers have to use discretion on how to handle situations they encounter. With each of these situations, an officer has contact with different ethnic groups. Many times these situations result in arrest, tickets, and occasionally a police officer shoots a suspect. When different ethnic groups have encounters with police some insist that the police racially discriminated against them. The question becomes do the police use racial discrimination or do they criminally profile suspects? Officers use criminal profiling to help them predict the characteristics of suspects. In the textbook

When officers receive calls, they must respond to the calls and judge how to handle each situation as they occur within these social classes. Many times the ethnicity of the person has nothing to do with the incident. Instead, the social class influences what crimes are committed. In an article “American Policing Under Fire: Misconduct and Reform,” by Ronald Weitzer, he explains how race is not the problem. Weitzer is able to illuminate how there is a correlation between poverty and crime, “an interaction between (1) high neighborhood-level poverty and unemployment, (2) residents’ involvement in illicit survival strategies […], and (3) aggressive police practices – each of which contributes to popular alienation from and avoidance of the police, if not outright hostility toward them. This syndrome is more fundamental than the popular assertion that officers’ racial animus is the main problem.” (477). Because high crime areas have such a strong dislike and mistrust for the police, answering some calls become dangerous for the responding officers. While answering these calls officers become more alert and anxious. Most of the time when an officer makes an arrest or discharges his/her weapon it has nothing to do with race but it has everything to do with the crime. An officer will do whatever it takes to keep him/her and the community safe. This is when some ethnic groups will claim the incident

In all reality, a police officer is not responding to the skin color of the individual but to the environment in which the crime has been committed. The article “Black Supporters of Racial Profiling: A Demographic Profile” by Shaun L. Gabbidon, George E. Higgins and Kideste M. Wilder-Bonner. Gabbidon, Higgins, and Wilder-Bonner explain how demographic areas can affect how black males maybe looked at when a crime does occur. “Black males are overrepresented among perpetrators of violent crime, they may be perceived as a real threat and thus an appropriate target of racial profiling particularly in disadvantaged communities of color where violent victimization is most likely to occur” (11). This is biased-based policing and not permitted to happen in any of the states in America. Many of the areas that individuals yell racial profiling are destitute high crime areas, which typically have a large African American community. This would make it seem as though the police harassing African Americans, even though they are not. According to Dempsey and Forst, “biased-based policing is a form of discrimination that singles out people of racial or ethnic group due to the belief that these groups are more likely than others to commit certain types of crimes” (335). If one wants to look at this closer than one would need to go back to the UCR that shows that it is not African