Essay On Racial Profiling

Racial profiling has become a significant and controversial issue across the nation nowadays. In general, racial profiling is defined as discriminatory behaviors of law enforcement officers that target people for suspicion in breaking the law solely based on their race or ethnicity in the belief that certain minority groups have a higher chance to engage in unlawful behavior. It is often discussed in the context of traffic stops by local or state police officials. African Americans are the number one targets and victims of this law enforcement strategy. Racial profiling is not only wrong, unfair and discriminatory, but also a form of racism and a violation of the rights of African Americans, therefore law enforcement strategy needs to come to an end.

The most frequent use of racial profiling is in traffic stops, it deals with situations when minorities were stopped, interrogated or searched because of their race or ethnicity. Individual law enforcement agent who profile suspects solely on the basis of race or ethnicity violates the rights of those minorities. When race and ethnicity become factors in suspicious behavior, the civil rights of racial and ethnic minorities as a group are violated. Many members of minority groups across the nation have been claiming that police often use traffic violations as a pretext to stop a vehicle to investigate other possible crimes, such as drug and/or weapons violations, particularly African Americans, have long complained that the police, especially in suburban areas, stop them. For example, one of the scholarly articles on this issue states: “The stopping of black drivers, just to see what officers can find, has become so common in some places that this practice has its own name: African A...

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...t apparent issues with racial profiling is that it violates the Constitution. According to the Fourth Amendment, American citizens are supposed to be protected from unreasonable searches and seizures (Feder, 2). Thus, most cases of racial profiling are violating this Constitution because the race of a person is not a reasonable justification to search someone. In addition, the Fourteenth Amendment states "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." which suggests that all citizens are to be equally treated under the law. If this was the case, then everyone should have been treated equally, however, the fact is that African Americans are more likely to be searched by police and less likely to be treated as law-abiding citizens while white people are being treated the opposite way. This is conflicting the concept of equal protection.