Racial Profiling
"Racial profiling" refers to law enforcement strategies and practices that single out blacks and Hispanics as objects of suspicion solely on the basis of the color of their skin or accent. Under such practices, minorities are disproportionately targeted as criminal suspects, skewing at the outset the racial composition of the population ultimately charged, convicted and incarcerated.
Feature Stories
LCCR/EF Releases
Reports
Contacts Between Police and the Public: Findings From the 2002 National Survey (pdf) - U.S. Department of Justice - 04/01/05. Presents data on the nature and characteristics of contacts between residents of the U.S. and the police over a 12-month period. Findings are provided from a nationally representative survey of nearly 80,000 residents age 16 or older. Detailed information is presented on face-to-face contacts with the police, including the reason for and outcome of the contact, resident opinion on police behavior during the contact, and whether police used or threatened to use force during the contact. The report provides demographic characteristics of residents involved in traffic stops and use-of-force encounters and discusses the relevance of the survey findings to the issue of racial profiling.
Wrong Then Wrong Now: Racial Profiling Before and After September 11, 2001 - Leadership Conference on Civil Rights - 02/27/03
This Report compares the practice of "traditional" street-level racial profiling with the post-September 11 profiling of Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians. It concludes that profiling is just as wrong now as it was before the war on terrorism began. The same arguments that led President Bush and Attorney General Ashcroft to condemn racial profiling before September 11 should lead them to abandon it now.
Driving While Black: Racial Profiling on Our Nation's Highways - ACLU - 06/01/99. One of the core principles of the Fourth Amendment is that the police cannot stop and detain an individual without some reason – probable cause, or at least reasonable suspicion – to believe that he or she is involved in criminal activity. But recent Supreme Court decisions allow the police to use traffic stops as a pretext in order to "fish" for evidence. Both anecdotal and quantitative data show that nationwide, the police exercise this discretionary power primarily against African Americans and Latinos.
