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Racial profiling issues
Racial profiling issues
The Supreme Court and civil rights
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Racial Profiling Violates the Constitution
After the heinous attacks of Sept. 11, Americans have been forced to face the issue of racial profiling? Americans love to use data and statistics to justify their actions. What data might justify special searches of anyone who looks "Arab" at an airport? There are up to 7 million Arab Americans in the United States. If we add all those South Asians (1.6 million), Latinos and African Americans who might "appear" Arab, we have a ballpark figure of at least 10 million folks. How many of these are bona fide terrorists? Let's say 100. That amounts to 0.001 percent.
As a very rough comparison, consider that in 1999 alone, roughly 350,000 men were arrested for violent crimes. There are about 135 million men alive in america. That is a percentage of 0.26 percent. Does this mean that we should stop and search all men because they may act violently?
Second, parse the data correctly.
Humans are notoriously bad with probabilities. For instance, the fact that 100 percent of the terrorists in the Sept. 11 attacks were Arab-looking men does not mean that 100 percent of Arab-looking men are terrorists.
We also fixate on relative probabilities instead of absolute ones. So, even if the Arab-looking man seated to your left is 100 times more likely to be a terrorist than the Aryan-looking man seated to your right, 100 times a number essentially zero is still near zero.
Third, do not overestimate the benefit.
Is racial profiling really that effective? There will surely be "false negatives," those who turn out to be terrorists but do not fit the profile. Recall that many of the terrorists in the Sept. 11 attacks hardly behaved...
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...g policy be justified on the numbers. And maybe it can. But even then, moral principles embedded in our Constitution can trump utilitarian calculations. Isn't this precisely what the U.S. Supreme court claimed to be doing when it struck down useful affirmative-action programs because they allegedly violated the rights of innocent Whites? Let's hold the conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to his word: "In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is american."
Of course, many will pooh-pooh my call for careful, public deliberation with shibboleths heard during all wars: We have a "fighting constitution," which is not a "suicide pact."
I am no fan of weakness or suicide. But I do not delude myself into thinking that the Constitution in itself makes us strong. It merely makes us worthy of our strength.
play was set in 1912 two years before the first world war so from this
First of all, racial profiling is unfair to its victims . Racial profiling is seen through the police in “Hounding the Innocent”, which is unfair since a person shouldn’t be pulled over more because of their race and that many of these stops have little to no connection to an actual crime. “Young black and Hispanic males are being stopped, frisked, and harassed in breathtaking numbers” (Herbert, 29) This is unfair to all victims of racial
Blindspot, authors Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald reveal how people formulate decisions and judgments automatically based on their exposure to cultural attitudes regarding age, gender, race, ethnicity, social class, religion, disability status, and nationality. They claim a section of our brain, a“blind spot,” is responsible for storing the hidden biases that lead us to select choices and decisions in our life. Furthermore, the authors aim to unfold the scientific logic of their analysis of the effects of hidden biases so people will be “better able to achieve the alignment,” between their behavior and intentions (Banaji and Greenwald, 2013) preface
Introduction Terrorism and racial profiling is nothing new in our society. Although some people would like to believe that it is nonexistent, it is still a major issue in today’s world. With that being said, my view on the subject is that racial profiling is going to continue to happen, whether we like it or not. I believe profiling isn’t necessarily meant to intentionally harm anyone, but is used as a tool to prevent terrorism. Past terroristic attacks have led to the many stereotypes and prejudices that our country has today.
Racial profiling is the tactic of stopping someone because of the color of his or her skin and a fleeting suspicion that the person is engaging in criminal behavior (Meeks, p. 4-5). This practice can be conducted with routine traffic stops, or can be completely random based on the car that is driven, the number of people in the car and the race of the driver and passengers. The practice of racial profiling may seem more prevalent in today’s society, but in reality has been a part of American culture since the days of slavery. According to Tracey Maclin, a professor at the Boston University School of Law, racial profiling is an old concept. The historical roots “can be traced to a time in early American society when court officials permitted constables and ordinary citizens the right to ‘take up’ all black persons seen ‘gadding abroad’ without their master’s permission” (Meeks, p. 5). Although slavery is long since gone, the frequency in which racial profiling takes place remains the same. However, because of our advanced electronic media, this issue has been brought to the American public’s attention.
One reason we must have the second amendment is to protect the freedom for which our country fought so hard to win. The Declaration of Independence states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”[1] However, if these rights were ‘self-evident’, why did the founding fathers need to grant them to the states? We might as well ask why man is the way that he is, imperfect. We all wonder about this sad truth, but the fact remains that man is fallen. These rights are self-evident, obvious to human reason, but because humans are fallen, we are sometimes blinded to these apparent truths and we err in our rationality. King George was blind to these unalienable rights, as were Na...
the end of the Second World War. The play is set in 1912, just before
Racial profiling in the dictionary is “the assumption of criminality among ethnic groups: the alleged policy of some police to attribute criminal intentions to members of some ethnic groups and to stop and question them in disproportionate numbers without probable cause (“Racial Profiling”).” In other words racial profiling is making assumptions that certain individuals are more likely to be involved in misconduct or criminal activity based on that individual’s race or ethnicity. Racial profiling propels a brutalizing message to citizens of the United States that they are pre-judged by the color of their skin rather than who they are and this then leads to assumptions of ruthlessness inside the American criminal justice system. With race-based assumptions in the law enforcement system a “lose-lose” situation is created due to America’s diverse democracy and destroys the ability to keep the criminal justice system just and fair. Although most police officers perform their duties with fairness, honor, and dedication, the few officers who portray to be biased then harm the whole justice system resulting in the general public stereotyping every law enforcement officer as a racial profiler (Fact Sheet Racial Profiling). When thinking about racial profiling many people automatically think it happens only to blacks but sadly this is mistaken for far more ethnic groups and races such as Jews, Muslims, Mexicans, Native Americans, and many more are racially profiled on a day to day basis. Many people believe racial profiling to be a myth because they see it as police officers merely taking precautions of preventing a crime before it happens, but in reality racial profiling has just become an approved term for discrimination and unjust actio...
...al profiled. The way is by the color of their skin. People say that racial profiling is a good way to stop terrorism and violence and stolen merchandise, but they don’t know the affect it has to the other minorities. If you were a minority you wouldn’t want to have people look at you differently or even make assumptions about you. To stop racial profiling we should stop judging how people look and stop recalling what happened in the pass with their ethnicity. Witherbee Amy ebscohost.com stated “Those who would defend racial profiling admitted that the policy bound to infringe upon the rights of African Americans who were targeted because of their appearance, but claimed that profiling made sense based on statistics that showed blacks and Latino Americans were more likely to be convicted with drugs crimes.” Would you make an effort to put an end to racial profiling?
Before any argument can be made against racial profiling, it is important to understand what racial profiling is. The American Civil Liberties Union, defines racial profiling as "the discriminatory practice by law enforcement officials of targeting individuals for suspicion of crime based on the individual's race, ethnicity, religion or national origin"(Racial Profiling: Definition). Using this definition we can determine that racial profiling excludes any evidence of wrong-doing and relies solely on the characteristics listed above. We can also see that racial profiling is different from criminal profiling, which uses evidence of wrong-doing and facts which can include information obtained from outside sources and evidence gathered from investigation. Based on these definitions, I will show that racial profiling is unfair and ineffective because it relies on stereotyping, encourages discrimination, and in many cases can be circumvented.
Joel Best’s Damned Lies and Statistics is a book all about recognizing statistics that are legitimate and others that are really quite horrible. The goal of this book is not that the average every day person be able to read a statistical table from a scholarly journal, but rather that anyone could personally value a statistic he or she may come across in a newspaper article or on a news program. Best was essentially effective in achieving his goal; however, he was effective to the point of overdoing his job of showing that there are bad statistics which give readers cause to evaluate them outside of hearing them on the news.
In the United States of America today, racial profiling is a deeply troubling national problem. Many people, usually minorities, experience it every day, as they suffer the humiliation of being stopped by police while driving, flying, or even walking for no other reason than their color, religion, or ethnicity. Racial profiling is a law enforcement practice steeped in racial stereotypes and different assumptions about the inclination of African-American, Latino, Asian, Native American or Arab people to commit particular types of crimes. The idea that people stay silent because they live in fear of being judged based on their race, allows racial profiling to live on.
Another word for generalization is stereotyping or profiling. Malcolm points out how the New York City Police Department started sending officers in to the subways to do random searches of passengers bags, to look for terrorists, due to the transit bombings in London. The police commissioner says they have a policy against racial profiling but then how are they picking out which peoples bags to check? The police commissioner explains how making a generalization based off of looks is incredibly useless. Not only did the 9/11 hijackers shave to look American but the London bombers were all of a different ethnicity and couldn't be easily picked out of a group based on looks. Profiling is seemed as inefficient because terrorists aren't stupid and show up looking exactly how you assume they would, because clearly they would be profiled by everyone who sees them. So, in turn, anyone could be seen as a terrorist if someone profiles them but we don't ban people of the same ethnicity as a previous terrorist, society might not completely accept and trust them but they don't ban them. How then could we look at a pit bull and just assume that it is a brutal killer. Generalizing, or profiling, has so many holes in it. No one can truly look at someone and see what they are like. Profiling them just makes a social gap between people and creates
Unlike many other foundational documents written by other counties, the US Constitution has held strong from the start. The Constitution is at the center of our everyday lives and is the reason we are able to live with the freedom and security that we do. As the Constitutions author, contents, and effect on the US are evaluated it is very clear why America holds so strongly to the foundation the Constitution set in place.
Racial profiling in America, as evidenced by recent events, has reached a critical breaking point. No longer can an African American, male or female, walk into a store, school, or any public place without fear of being stereotyped as a person of suspicion. Society constantly portrays the African American