Police Profiling

Sources of Disparity

One explanation for racial profiling is that it occurs due to the actions of racist law enforcement officers toward minorities. Some people believe that profiling is merely the problem of racist individuals, not the systematic problem of organizations. From this perspective, individual discriminatory actions by police, judges, correction personnel, and prosecutors are seen as the main cause of profiling, and individual discriminatory actions based on race and ethnicity should be dealt with by harsh policies and punishing the people who are involved. However, others claim that individual discriminatory actions account for a small fraction of the overall problem. The “bad apples” explanation does not adequately explain the overrepresentation of minorities at the different stages of criminal justice system. Some people believe that racial profiling is not a problem in which a few bad apples in law enforcement engage, but rather, it is a systematic and accepted belief within law enforcement that minorities are more likely to commit crime than are Whites.

Another argument for racial profiling made by some scholars and practitioners is the cognitive stereotyping of law enforcement agencies that, based on the premise that minorities are more likely to commit crime, targeting minorities for offenses may result in uncovering many other violations. Racial profiling is done not with the idea of discrimination, but with the idea of efficient use of resources by law enforcement to get the maximum benefits from their actions. Therefore, some law enforcement agencies identify hot spots in their geographic jurisdictions—that is, locations where the majority of the crimes occur—and they try to intervene in those places to combat crime. This tactic is considered a costeffective allocation of law enforcement resources.

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