Racial Profiling

Racial Profiling

Measuring Racial Profiling

What if racial profiling were useful? Even, perhaps, very useful? Are the costs of racial profiling so significant that racial profiling should be banned? Courts and commentators do not ask these questions; indeed, they rarely, if ever, acknowledge that racial profiling may be useful. This paper explores what costs police would have to justify, and how they might do so in order to use racial pr...

Reverse Deterrence in Racial Profiling

A controlled experiment tested the possibility that racial profiling—disproportionate scrutiny of a minority racial group by sanctioned authorities—would have a “reverse deterrent” effect on the illicit behavior of members of a nonprofiled majority group. Research participants given a task involving extremely difficult anagrams were given the opportunity to cheat. White participants randomly as...

Psychoanalytic perspectives on racial profiling.

Jeffrey Goldberg's comments in "The Color of Suspicion"' are comprehensive, factual, and an indictment of the racist practice of profiling. I found it fascinating and revealing to read that racial profiling had its genesis in practices by the Federal Bureau of Investigation's behavioral science unit and the Drug Enforcement Administration's encouragement of state officials to profile drug couri...

Assessing Racial Profiling More Credibly

For many individuals, traffic stops are the most frequent interaction they have with police. Since the I-95 “turnpike” studies of the mid-1990s, which were primarily motivated by the widespread use of drug-courier profiles in highway enforcement along trafficking corridors, public concern has grown that urban traffic stops may also be plagued by racial profiling. Given this concern, more than 4...