Police use of Racial Profiling Essays

Police use of Racial Profiling Essays Police use of Racial Profiling Paper Police use of Racial Profiling Paper I disagree with the vast majority, because I think the use of race in deciding whom to treat as a suspect is Just one of many factors in a police officers decision. According to Nadia Karee Nettle Racial profiling is a form of discrimination by which law enforcement uses a persons race or cultural background as the primary reason to suspect that the individual has broken the law (Para. 1). Others that oppose this view say that it is racist to consider race as a factor in any situation because it is treating a person of one race differently than a person of another race. Law enforcement considering the race of an individual is viewed as a violation of a persons right to equality under the law. And this violation is very accurate if and only if the race is the only factor being considered when suspecting an individual otherwise it is Just another observation about the situation that the law enforcement officer makes. Racial profiling is normally associated with racism even though the act of racial profiling is not inherently racist. According to Randall Kennedy (1999) racial profiling is not necessarily evil or immoral, but it is the use of facts and the environment that make a police officer use race as a factor in deciding whether or not to be suspicious of a certain person (Para. 6). An example of using many factors to identify a suspect would be when a Kansas City DEAD officer stopped a young black man who was acting in suspicious ways in an airport, and information regarding the local area said that gangs of young black men have been moving drugs into the area through major transportation hubs such as the airport (Kennedy, 1999, Para. 1). With the information the agent was given he was able to make an educated guess as to whether or not the young man was worth any more of his attention. When that young man was detained it was discovered that he did indeed have illegal substances on him with the intent to transport it. This situation is a great example of how the police use context clues and piece together a bigger picture using many factors, and one of those factors happens to be race. The Department of Justice fact sheet on racial profiling (2003) states that racial profiling is considered acceptable to use in order to identify terrorists (p. 5). It is considered acceptable to use race in order to narrow a search field so that the chances of finding a terrorist are even greater. This would make sense of why random searches are not actually random, but there is a set of factors that come into play not saying that every random search has a purpose, but it would be pointless to randomly search a 10 year old girl caring a teddy bear with her pregnant mother. Even a federal agency has acknowledged that in order to narrow a search field the use of race as a factor is acceptable. Just because race is used to help narrow a suspect field does not mean racial profiling is racist. Police encounter accusations of racism every day and that is because police have Jobs that require hem to deal with all kinds of people for hours on end, and those people are of all different types of races. Police officers stop people all day long and one of the many ways they do that is with a traffic stop. Police are always in danger because the Job is a dangerous one, but traffic stops are one of the most dangerous occasions that a police officer encounters, because the person the officer Just stopped is a complete stranger and the officer has no idea what is inside the car or if the person has a weapon. It is one of the few occasions where an officer is likely to have zero idea of hat he or she is walking into. Since there is such a big danger with traffic stops the officer must use every piece of information that can be gathered, one of which would be the race of the driver. According to Vito Walsh (2008) when officers go to the police academy to learn to become a police officer they are taught how to identify odd behavior and driving activities as criminal behavior ( p. 91). Police can use intuition and experience to make a decision about a situation. For example if an area has a high rate of Latino Americans participating in illegal immigration a police officer will be more suspicious of a windowless van driving around following every road law to the finest detail with a Latino American driving than he/she would be of a minivan with a 35 year old white female driving. It would be the logical decision to pull over the windowless van because all of the clues point to that being the more likely option, because all of the information the police officer has about the area, and his training tell him that the windowless van would pose a more likely candidate for transporting illegal immigrants. Police discretion involves reasonable suspicion and probable cause. Probable cause Exists when facts and circumstances within a police officers knowledge, which are based on reasonably trustworthy information, are sufficient to warrant a person of reasonable caution to believe that an offense has been or is being committed by the person being arrested (Cox, Macrame, Carmella, 2014, p. 207). The courts system of the United States places discretionary power in the hands of the police and these two terms are deeply rooted in the way police operate when they approach any situation. One of the tools of discretion police officers have is reasonable suspicion, and it is defined as the Objective facts and logical conclusions given a specific set of circumstances (Cox, Macrame, Carmella, 2014, p. 208). Reasonable suspicion is a very good representation of how the police are told to observe facts and make logical conclusions about every situation. Establishing reasonable suspicion is a tough Job though because it needs to be backed up in court if it makes it that far. The situations where reasonable suspicion is most applicable would be with a stop and frisk. As mentioned below the court case Terry v. Ohio established reasonable suspicion as enough to stop an individual and frisk them. Seeing as how reasonable suspicion is based on objective facts and logical conclusions then the law views anything that makes coming to a logical conclusion using objective facts, such as race, perfectly acceptable for police officers use (Cox, Macrame, Carmella, 2014, p. 208). The police are given many powers by the people of the United States in order to serve and protect the public. One of those powers is a terry stop this is the result of a supreme court case know as Terry v. Ohio. This case gives the police power to stop somebody as long as the officer has reasonable suspicion of criminal behavior. They are also allowed to frisk the individual, but only if the officer has reason to believe the individual poses a threat to the officer or other citizens (Nubian Thompson, 1968, p. 33) Although the action that the court has approved is at its heart not racist, because the United States legal system views everyone equally, that doesnt stop some police officers from abusing it and choosing to make racist decisions. In this aspect we trust the police to use their discretion and actually make an unbiased decision that is best for the protection of everybodys rights. The police are given a very large amount of discretion in terms of how they treat people and a pproach situations. We trust them to follow the law and protect everyones freedoms, but there will always be people that abuse the power that is given to them. Stop and frisk policies have become a hot button issue because it leaves the choice of whom to stop and frisk up to the police office. There was a situation in New York city where mayor Michael R. Bloomberg enacted a law giving the police the power to stop anyone if the police officer reasonably suspects he or she is in danger (NYC Criminal Procedure, 2014). According to Mayor Bloomberg in a Huffing Post article (2013) Ninety percent of all people killed in our city -? and 90 percent of all those who commit the murders and other violent crimes -? are black and Hispanic (Para. ). The reason for the majority of people being stopped belonging to a minority is because the areas where the police officers are sent to are areas where a large number of minorities live and the crime rate is really high, and the city feels that it would be more effective to apply police to these high crime areas (Bloomberg, 2013, Para. 2-8). The results are eradicable if this is the case. The only logical conc lusion is that more African Americans, Latino, and other minorities will be stopped and frisked if more police are sent to areas with a high population of minorities. The police are not sent to these areas because of the minorities in the area, but instead they are sent there because of the high crime rates with the intent of lowering that high crime rate and making those areas safer for the innocent residents who are victimized by the criminals that do live in the area. Since there is a lot of discretion given to police officers there are always those few officers that abuse the power given to them and end up making decisions such as whom to stop and frisk based entirely on the race of the individual. Those police officers actions are wrong and not the type of racial profiling that is acceptable. Officers that do use race as a sole factor in determining a suspect cannot properly call their actions racial profiling, but instead those actions should be considered acts of racism. Racist behavior is not tolerated in law enforcement because that would be bringing personal biases into the work place and hat would compromise the individual officers ability to make an unbiased decision. Racist decisions have no place in law enforcement because they create a situation where the eyes of the law do not view someone as equal, but instead are viewed as lesser than other human beings. Police officers who make racist decisions have no place in law enforcement and they are the few that tarnish the reputation of the many. It was previously mentioned that there are many factors leading into a police officer making his/her decision to treat someone as a suspect or not. The police use sat experiences as well as their training in order to identify a suspect using many factors. The environment that the officer is in, including the characteristics and crime rates of the neighborhood plays a part in his/her decision making process. Another group of factors that the police take into consideration is the characteristics of the person being looking at. Factors such as gender, age, and the size to formulate a profile of this individual and decide whether or not to be suspicious of the individual being observed (Albert, Bennett, Dunham, ; Stressing, 2005, p. 369). If the arson of interest is in a neighborhood with a high crime rate and there have been past occurrences of violence towards police officers, then the officer in the area will be more likely to treat everyone with more suspicion. Also if the individual in question is a young Japanese man dressed in a gang outfit in a neighborhood known for its connection to the Japanese mafia then the police officer will take interest in that person, and possibly pursue or stop him. The factors involved in a police officers decisions are a lot more complex than we think, because police look at the environment and the individual both at the same time. Sometimes the complicated line of decision making police officers use may lead the public to make blanket perception about all members of law enforcement. The main reason that citizens disagree with racial profiling is that the public view it as racist and therefore an unfavorable action. Those who oppose racial profiling claim it is racist to use race as a factor at all in deciding to treat someone as a suspect. I disagree with that statement, because the police use race as an aid to help them make a more precise decision about the person they suspect of a crime. There is statistical evidence Enid officers choice to suspect one race over another while investigating a crime. According to the Bis Uniform Crime Report in table AAA (2011) there are crimes that are more common among certain races of people like how 65% of the people arrested for forcible rape were white, and 55. 6% of arrests for robbery were African Americans (FBI). Also in the same report shows that 72. 9% of arson arrests are of someone who is white, and 86. 7% of arrests for gambling are African American (FBI). These statistics go to show that there are indeed certain racial groups of people that commit certain rimes more than others. These particular tables are of national data so the exact numbers vary in every local area so the officers in their respective precincts react differently to the data they collect. Data gathered through research influences something known as the police subculture, because the police react to new crime patterns and those are created using statistical evidence. The police subculture can be described as the shared values, attitudes, and norms created within the occupational and organizational environment of policing (Cox, Macrame, Carmella, 2014, p. 8). Police adopt a whole new view of the world whenever they start their Jobs, and they all adopt a similar if not exactly the same view. The reason this subculture would play such a huge role in all the factors a police officer uses to decide whom to suspect is because the police are always in danger with their line of work and they need every single tool at their disposal in order to protect themselves and other innocent civilians. Due to this subculture that all police become part of, the police in general view every citizen as a possible threat and danger to the public, and homeless, and that requires the police to use any and all environmental factors in order to make an educated decision. (Cox, Macrame, Carmella, 2014, p. 178). Racial profiling as defined before is intertwined with the police subculture and not viewed as a weapon against minorities but more as a tool to be used to aid the police in their efforts to prevent crime and keep the public safe from harm. When people stand up against racial profiling they are painting Just one group to be the subject of racial profiling, and those subjects are said to be the minority populations. Though he African American, Latino American, Asian American, etc.. Populations get profiled so do white Americans. The notable example of this would be the profiling of a serial killer. After a string of murders is identified as serial killings the next decision is to find the person responsible because they are extremely dangerous if they are left in society to run rampant. The police instantly start building a profile of the serial killer, and the first thing they do is assume the suspect will be white because statistically 80% of the serial killers that have been caught are white males (Sun, 2009, Para. ). This is racial profiling, and the police do it so that they can narrow their search field and not have to waste resources in unlikely areas. One could argue that the police doing such a thing makes it likely to skip over the actual suspect, but that is false because all the police are doing is limiting the search field. They are not completely eliminating groups of people from the suspect pool because they do not match the assumption that the serial killer would be white, because this is where the other factors that police look at come into play and they look beyond race for other elites. So it is a moot point to argue that racial profiling could skip over the actual perpetrator, because there are more factors being looked aside from the race of a profile. Race is not Just used against minorities when profiling a suspect, but it is also used against the majority sometimes so this would go to show that race is not used exclusively to target a single race or group of races. The police only use race as a factor in order to narrow a search pool and use their resources wisely while maximizing their effectiveness. Police officers all around the world wake up every ironing and put on a bullet proof vest and go to work to protect and serve the community. Police are forced to confront situations that a majority of Americans will never face in their lives and in order to make decisions the police need to use every aspect of every situation in order to make the safest and most logical decision. Police officers always will have to use the discretion that the citizens of the United States have given to them in order to make the best educated decision they can. Sometimes that Judgment is influenced by race, but that is not the sole factor in the average officers decision.