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The Pros And Cons Of Racial Profiling

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Racism is a serious social issue in America today just as it has always been since its founding. There has been huge leaps towards equality for all races. However, even with anti-discrimination laws in place, people still claim that racism is just as prominent as it always has been (Robson 10). Movements like Black Lives Matter are completely unjustified as all they do is incite violence and contradict their own cause. Racial profiling is also not a product of indoctrinated racism but a product of fact and crime prevention. There are several issues people have today related to race. One issue is the use of racial profiling as a legitimate form of police work. “The use of race or ethnicity as grounds for suspecting someone of having committed …show more content…
Sunil Dutta states, “Each day, they go out in the field looking for Latino males of a certain age who dress in a particular way, have certain tattoos on their bodies and live in an area where street gangs flourish. Does that mean they are engaging in racial profiling? No. They are using crime data to identify possible suspects. Ethnicity is just one of many criteria they consider.” Police do not use race as a discriminatory feature, simple as a feature to help find the suspect they are looking for as it immediately eliminates most of the surrounding population. This is backed up by the quote also from Dutta which claims, “If the suspect is an 80-year-old white woman, the search won't focus on young black men.” As another piece of evidence directly from the FBI, in 2013, white people killed 3005 people total, only 189 of which being African American. In 2013 also, African Americans murdered 2491 people total, 409 of which being white. At first glance you might think that racial profiling is wrong by these statistics because white people killed more people total and that would give reason for movements like Black Lives Matter. Alternately, this disproves both because is you account for population percentage, whites make up roughly 72.4% of the population with blacks making up roughly 12.6% of the population in according to a census taken in April 2010. At a …show more content…
The argument is void because what makes race so special? Why is race any different than age? Age and race are both physical attributes that you can’t change which is why police use them to help find criminal. Inner City areas full of minorities and gang violence are most definitely going to have a higher rate of minorities stopped because in the inner cities it is typical for a group of minorities with gang bandanas to be up to no good, the same goes for white people. Aforementioned in different words is, “Supporters of racial profiling, however, argue that the unfortunate reality is that members of minority groups are more likely to commit crimes than are white people; therefore, police officers are justified in regarding them with heightened suspicion” (Racial Profiling: Is Racial Profiling a Necessary Police Practice?). Minorities in crime ridden neighborhoods get stopped more than the white person walking in the hills because there is often more crime in the inner city

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