Racial profiling is where the police, the FBI or other law enforcement singles you out in part because of your race. It affects one American in nine. It is a common experience for black and Native American men, but it affects Latinos and Asians too.
- In 1992 the Denver police had a list of suspected criminals. It listed 80% of the people of colour in the city.
- The Los Angeles police had the name and address of most young black men in the city – because it had stopped them!
- From 1986 to 1995, at the height of the Crack Era, not a single white person in southern California was found guilty of breaking any of the crack laws passed by Congress – even though plenty of whites used and sold crack.
- The FBI spies on Muslim Americans in Detroit looking for a terrorist plot.
- People of colour driving on I-95 in Maryland in the 1990s were four times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police – even though whites were more likely to be found with drugs or contraband.
See below for posts on nine more cases.
- Is based on offensive stereotypes that as generalizations are anywhere between untrue to useless.
- Creates distrust of law enforcement among people of colour, making policing worse not better.
- Creates a self-fulfilling prophecy by filling prisons with people of a certain kind.
- Criminalizes race – driving while black, the Japanese American internment, etc.
Contrary to stereotype:
- 70% of shoplifters are white,
- 94% of domestic terrorists are not Muslim,
- whites and blacks use drugs at about the same rate and
- most people in America, no matter what their race, are citizens – even most Latinos and most Asians.
The case of Seattle: In 2002 the University of Washington studied drugs and policing in Seattle. In a world without racial profiling the police would follow citizen reports of drug dealing and, if they truly cared about protecting Seattle, they would look at hospital records to see which drugs were the most dangerous. The police did neither. Instead they went after crack dealers. Crack was not causing all that much violence while heroin was sending way more people to the hospital. But crack was the one drug in Seattle more likely to be sold by blacks. Even in places where whites and blacks were both clearly selling drugs, the police were still far more likely to arrest blacks.
The Seattle police were not so much fighting drugs or crime as locking up black men.
From 1964 to 2001 that would have been racist in the eyes of the law. But in Alexander v Sandoval (2001) the Supreme Court overturned “disparate impact” as proof of racism (except for cases brought by the federal government). Now you must prove intent. In effect, the police are only racist if they say they are.
To Michelle Alexander and Angela Davis racial profiling makes possible the new peculiar institution: the mass incarceration of black men.
To John McWhorter racial profiling makes possible black victimology.
Source: Mostly from Michelle Alexander & Cornel West, “The New Jim Crow” (2012).