The article “Should Racial Profiling Be Accepted as a Law Enforcement Practice? “, published by ProCon. org discusses the pros and cons on if racial profiling should be practiced by the law enforcement. Those in favor of this practice admit that people of color are targeted more by law enforcement agencies because they are the ones who usually commit crimes. When officers practiced racial profiling, the reports that had been made showed that minorities were the ones mostly committing crime. Those opposing this proposition explain why racial profiling is an inefficient strategy.
Many minorities arrested due to racial profiling, who are falsely convicted and imprisoned end up being innocent. Let’s face it, racial profiling is an excuse, disguised as a reason, for law enforcement agencies to target people of color/minorities. Who are the ones randomly selected at an airport for an extra security check? It’s usually someone from an ethnic minority, or as Sam Harris suggested the TCA should focus on the real threat who are, “Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim. After 9/11, sadly, this has become the mindset of many Americans. Much of this has to do with what and how the media portrays something. It’s as if the media has the upper hand on choosing who is considered a threat and the majority of Americans just follow. According to Debbie Schlussel all terrorists have “names like Mohammed Salameh, Nidal Ayyad, Ahmad Mohammed Ahaj, Mahmoud Aboulhalima, Abdul Rahman Yasin, Ramzi Yousef, Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali… “. Labeling a whole community as terrorists by the similarity of their names seems pretty unjust to me.
After the Columbine High School Massacre, the media portrayed the murderers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, as students who struggled with depression, loneliness and were victims of bullying. No one ever said anything about names, we just heard the sob story of their life and how that led them to murder innocent people. Life moved on, Eric and Dylan are just regular names, regular white boy names. In many cases when the criminal is white, we hear the sob story or about their accomplishments in life. There’s always a reason why the white person committed a crime.
White people will soon realize that being white is an advantage when it comes to committing a crime. In a recent case from this year a white boy, Dylan Schumaker, beat a 23-month-old baby to death. He thought he could use his white privilege to get away with it. He told his mother, “I’m a 16-year-old blond, probably all I have to do is cry, and they’re going to feel sorry for me. ” A young white boy thinking he can use his white privilege to get away with murder. I wonder where he could have got that idea from.
When law enforcement agencies were given power to stop and frisk anyone they had suspicion of, it’s as if racial profiling was put to practice. From the year stop and frisk was created, 2002, to the year it was banned, 2013, there were always huge differences in the amount of blacks and Latinos being stopped than there were of whites. According to data collected by Christopher Mathias, a natural reporter of the Huffington Post, he found out “more young black men were stopped by the NYPD in 2011 than there were young black men in NYC. Many of the stops being made were unconstitutional and the people were almost always found innocent. One could argue that the reason people of color are being targeted is because “by basic criminological data” they are the ones committing crimes(Johnson). One could also argue that the president of the U. S, Donald Trump, claimed that the use of stop and frisk reduced crime in NYC. However, what Johnson and Trump fail to realize is that the data they are referring to is all inaccurate because it was based on racial profiling.
The use of stop and frisk proved that officers focus more on skin color rather than the behavior of an individual, proving that criminological data will mostly always be inaccurate. According to the accurate data presented by Christopher Mathias, nearly 80% of stops were blacks and Latinos and 13% of them were whites yet, “a weapon was found in only 1. 8 percent of blacks and Latinos frisked, as compared to a weapon being found in 3. 8 percent of whites frisked.
Over 70% of the stops were blacks and Latinos and still whites had a higher percentage of carrying a weapon, which is over 50% of the cause for crimes. People of color are already targets for the law enforcement agencies. Allowing this practice will cause many minorities to feel ashamed of who they are and have white people thinking they are superior to others. As Americans we should be proud of what America has grown to be known for, which is our diversity and our freedom. If racial profiling was accepted as a law enforcement practice, we will be destroying what we have created America to be.
