Racial Profiling

Criminal Justice Context

Minority citizens, particularly African Americans, have consistently argued that racial discrimination is an important and prevalent phenomenon in every phase of their lives, including education, housing, and employment. Davis argues that during the 21st century, no other problem will have more deleterious effects on the African American community than the discrimination that they face in the criminal justice system.

In recent years, the problem of discrimination in the justice system has garnered both public outcry and sustained scholarly attention. Much of the scholarly research has focused on the impact that race has on both law enforcement and sentencing outcomes. In general, this research has found that African Americans are disproportionately stopped, arrested, and incarcerated relative to their representation in the population. Although some argue that the overrepre-sentation is a reflection of their actual involvement in crime, others suggest that the disproportionate representation results from racial discrimination in the criminal justice system. These purported discriminatory experiences have since become the explanation for the high levels of distrust that African Americans hold toward the criminal justice system.

Prior research on attitudes toward the criminal justice system has primarily focused on perceptions of [Page 1112]the police. This research has consistently demonstrated that African American citizens are more likely to hold negative perceptions of police compared with White and Hispanic citizens. Racially biased policing, excessive use of force, and unjustified stops have all been shown to account for the negative perceptions.

History of Racial Profiling

Some scholars credit the start of racial profiling to the War on Drugs in the 1980s when the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) developed and encouraged the use of drug courier profiles. Drug courier profiles are characteristics or behaviors that were thought to be associated with drug couriers. The DEA introduced a program known as Operation Pipeline, which trained patrol officers in the use of drug courier profiles that either implicitly or explicitly encouraged the targeting of citizens using race, along with other extralegal factors, to apprehend drug traffickers. Operation Pipeline was supported by the U.S. Justice Department, which maintained that using race as an explicit profile characteristic produced more efficient crime control than did random stops.

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