Racial Profiling: A Persistent Issue in America

Throughout American history, there has been, without a doubt, an indisputable sense of racial tension among the various ethnic groups of the nation. These issues have been traced back since the establishment of the colonies and are still prevalent today in one form or another. Although the tension is no longer as intense as it was before, it continues to exist today in modern society in the form of racial profiling. Racial profiling can be defined as the use of race or ethnicity as criteria for suspecting someone of having committed an offense. In recent decades, a trend has been observed in which police forces have been distinctively targeting black and Hispanic Americans more often than other ethnic groups. Police departments have argued

There is an abundance of evidence in support of this as well as the claims of experts and even law enforcement officials. In an article from the LA Times, LAPD watchdog takes a long look into allegations of racial profiling, the police Chief of the LAPD, Charlie Beck, explains how although it is not rampant, he acknowledges the existence of racial profiling (Mather, Chang). Racial profiling has not provided any benefit to society at all, as recent events have proven. In fact, it has created an even more unsettling issue in which a significant fraction of the minority population does not trust the police. A survey conducted in Los Angeles reported that, “less than half of all residents, of 49.7%, agreed that the LAPD officers treated people of all races and ethnicities fairly” (Mather, Chang). This results are critical because the population cannot trust the police with what they had sworn to do.The Police Accountability Task Force in Chicago reported that, in 2016, “black and Hispanic drivers were searched approximately four times as often as white drivers, yet {the department’s} data showed that contraband was found on white drivers twice as often as black and Hispanic drivers” (Makarechi). These unsettling results reveal the ineffectiveness of racial profiling as more minorities were searched but the fraction of them that were arrested was much smaller. Bob Herbert of the LA Times explains it concisely in his article, Jim Crow Policing, that, “the fact that a certain percentage of criminals may be black or hispanic is no reason for the police to harass individuals from those groups when there is no indication whatsoever that they have done anything wrong”