Special Report No. 1
"Racial profiling" refers to law enforcement strategies and practices that single out African Americans and Hispanics as objects of suspicion solely on the basis of the color of their skin or their 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.
Law enforcement officials who engage in racial profiling essentially treat race as evidence of crime, targeting certain segments of the population as potential criminal offenders solely by virtue of their race. Innocent minorities are thus harassed more than innocent white Americans due to racial and ethnic stereotyping, and wrongdoing by minorities is punished more harshly than wrongdoing by whites. Not surprisingly, such unfair treatment of minorities breeds distrust and disrespect for law enforcement in those communities.
Law enforcement officials who target minority suspects through racial profiling are frequently driven by the mistaken beliefs that (1) minorities commit most crimes and (2) most minorities commit crimes.
For example, a nationwide study by the United States Customs Service revealed that while over 43 percent of those subjected to searches as part of the Service's drug interdiction efforts were black or Hispanic, the "hit rates" (the rates at which the search revealed contraband) for those groups per capita were lower than for white Americans. And according to the General Accounting Office, while black female U.S. citizens were nine times more likely to be subjected to x-ray searches by U.S. Customs Officials than white female U.S. citizens, the black women searched were less than half as likely to be found carrying contraband as white females. The vast majority of African Americans and Hispanics - like the vast majority of whites - are law-abiding citizens.
As another example, monitoring by the Maryland State Police on I-95 from January 1995 to December 1997 found that 70 percent of the drivers stopped and searched by the police were black, while only 17.5 percent of all drivers -- and speeders -- were black. Even though black motorists were stopped much more frequently than their white counterparts, the proportion of stopped vehicles in which drugs were discovered was the same for white and black drivers.
Similarly, in Volusia County, Florida, nearly 70 percent of those stopped on a particular interstate highway in Central Florida in 1992 were black or Hispanic, although blacks and Hispanics comprised only 5 percent of all drivers on that highway.
Widespread racial profiling also occurs in the context of immigration enforcement. A recent study by the National Council of La Raza identified a pattern of selective enforcement of U.S. immigration laws by INS and local officials, whereby individuals of identifiably Hispanic origin - including many who were American citizens, legal permanent residents, or otherwise lawfully in the United States - were targeted by the authorities and subjected to interrogation, detention, or arrest for suspected immigration violations.
For example, the Arizona Attorney General's office found that law enforcement officials engaged in "Operation Restoration" in Chandler, Arizona (a joint endeavor of the Chandler Police Department and the U.S. Border Patrol) "without a doubt . . . stopped, detained, and interrogated [Chandler residents] . . . purely because of the color of their skin."
Overall, INS data indicates that nearly three-quarters (73.5%) of all of those deported by the INS are of Mexican origin -- even though Mexicans constitute less than half of all undocumented persons in the United States. Hispanics constitute approximately 60% of all undocumented persons, but well over 90% of those subjected to INS enforcement actions are Hispanic.
The inevitable result of such racial profiling is that far more minorities than white Americans are arrested, even though minorities are no more likely than whites to engage in illegal conduct that leads to arrest. The subtle biases and stereotypes that cause police officers to engage in racial profiling are compounded by racially skewed decisions of prosecutors, who, in this era of mandatory minimum sentences, play a larger role than ever in determining whether, and for how long, a convicted defendant will be in prison.
