Protesters in Los Angeles, California, stage a “die-in” demonstration to raise awareness about the fatal consequences of police brutality and racial profiling.
Chapter 1
Prejudice and Privilege
On the afternoon of November 22, 2014, a concerned Cleveland resident called 911 and reported seeing “a guy with a pistol” at a local park. He added that the gun was “probably fake” and that the person holding it was “probably a juvenile” but that the situation was making the caller uneasy. “Is he black or white?” asked the 911 dispatcher. The caller responded, “He’s black.” The person in question was twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, who was carrying a BB gun.
Another dispatcher relayed the caller’s information to two police officers, without mentioning the caller’s impressions of Rice’s youth or his suspicion that Rice’s gun was fake. She designated the situation as a Code 1, the highest priority emergency level.
Security camera footage from the park shows that the officers’ squad car drove across the grass and pulled up to a gazebo, no more than 7 feet (2 meters) from where Rice was playing. Within two seconds, Officer Timothy Loehmann got out of the car and shot Rice once in the stomach. When Rice’s fourteen-year-old sister ran to help him, officers tackled and handcuffed her. Samaria Rice, Tamir’s mother, also rushed to the park. She later recalled that the officers refused to let her through to her son. “The police told me to calm down or they would put me in the back of the police car.” Tamir died the next day in the hospital.
Demonstrator Tomiko Shine (center) holds a picture of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice (pictured), who was fatally shot by police in Washington, DC, in November 2014. His death sparked widespread calls for police accountability in cases of racial profiling and police brutality.
Authorities initiated multiple investigations into Tamir Rice’s shooting death. A report released in June 2015 by the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department stated that, while the officers said they had shouted warnings to Rice before shooting him, no conclusive proof of any type of warning could be found. Nevertheless, in October 2015, two other reports conducted by outside reviewers concluded that Loehmann had acted reasonably in deciding to fire his weapon. And in December 2015, a grand jury ruled that Loehmann’s actions were justified and that he would therefore not face criminal charges. Janai Nelson of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense Fund blamed several related factors for the legal outcome, saying, “Rice’s death and the lack of accountability for it are a result of racial profiling, incompetent 911 services, over-zealous and reckless policing practices, and a systemic bias in favor of police.”
Everyday Indignities
Racial profiling was not the sole cause of Tamir Rice’s death at the hands of police officers. Yet it plays a crucial role not only in Rice’s tragic fate but in numerous other American lives. In the United States, racial profiling is both an everyday reality for many Americans and a hot-button issue in the national conversation about race, policing, and justice.
So what is racial profiling? The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), an organization that advocates for individual rights and freedoms, defines it 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.” Amnesty International USA, an organization that campaigns for human rights, uses a similar definition, although it clarifies that profiling can be appropriate if “there is trustworthy information, relevant to the locality and timeframe, that links persons belonging to [certain groups] to an identified criminal incident or scheme.” In the United States, racial profiling typically targets African Americans, as well as people of Latino (or Hispanic), Middle Eastern, American Indian, and Asian descent. Muslims—followers of the religion of Islam—also frequently encounter profiling, as do other people who are perceived to be Muslim based on their appearance and perceived racial backgrounds.
At its most basic level, racial profiling assumes a connection between a person’s racial or ethnic background and the likelihood that the person is prone to criminal behavior—or otherwise deserving of distrust. Profilers—who may include police officers, security officials, prison guards, bankers, lawyers, and average citizens—react to the person based on this assumption. Depending on the situation, the expression of racial profiling can vary widely, from a suspicious look or an aggressive comment to denial of a loan, rejection of a job application, arrest, incarceration, harassment, physical injury, and death.
Americans disagree on how often profiling occurs in the United States. At some levels of law enforcement, official policy explicitly permits racial profiling. For instance, federal agents may legally consider race and ethnicity when stopping travelers at airports, border crossings, and immigration checkpoints. Federal guidelines also allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to use the ethnic makeup of neighborhoods as a basis for targeting investigations and recruiting informants. Twenty out of fifty states have no laws banning racial profiling by police. Even in settings where the practice is prohibited, racial profiling can occur unofficially, and it is difficult for victims to prove that they have been targeted. On a case-by-case basis, observers frequently disagree on whether an individual incident shows definitive evidence of racial profiling. For example, Lieutenant Steve James, president of the Long Beach Police Officers Association in California, insists that his fellow officers never engage in the practice. “There is no racial profiling. There just isn’t.” He goes on to clarify that “there is criminal profiling,”—the identification of a suspect in a specific crime based on a witness’s description of the criminal.
However, most experts conclude that racial profiling is pervasive throughout US society. People of color face a dramatically higher level of suspicion in almost every aspect of their lives, a situation that some call “breathing while black” or “breathing while brown.” The ACLU writes that racial profiling “occurs every day, in cities and towns across the country, when law enforcement and private security target people of color for humiliating and often frightening detentions, interrogations, and searches without evidence of criminal activity and based on perceived race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion. . . . Racial profiling has led countless people to live in fear, casting entire communities as suspect simply because of what they look like, where they come from, or what religion they adhere to.”
While racial profiling is closely tied to law enforcement, any institution or individual can engage in profiling. Individuals may profile coworkers, neighbors, and even strangers they encounter in passing. (While individuals often profile people whose backgrounds differ from their own, people may also profile others who share their own racial, ethnic, religious, or national heritage.) Often, however, these individual acts of profiling can be traced to institutions—such as schools, businesses, law enforcement agencies, and government bodies—that allow and even encourage profiling. The structure, rules, and practices of US institutions together foster a larger system of racial bias that stretches far beyond the actions of any single person, leading to widespread racial profiling across all sectors of US society.
Economists, legal scholars, psychologists, and other experts who study racial profiling in the United States stress that the majority of citizens do not deliberately single out or mistreat individuals because of race, ethnicity, or religion. Profiling is often implicit (subtle and frequently unintentional) rather than explicit (intentional and overt). Many people are not consciously aware that they are racially profiling and genuinely believe they have other, valid reasons for suspecting certain people of criminal behavior. Institutions too may have policies that aim to be unbiased yet, in practice, feed a cycle of racial profiling and inequality.
Whether implicit or explicit, individual or institutional, racial profiling leaves deep psychological scars among its victims, hinders the social and economic opportunities of people of color, and creates deep mistrust and fear at all levels of society. Racial profiling in the United States stems from centuries of embedded racism, as well as deeply ingrained modern viewpoints, patterns of discrimination, and privilege.
The Roots of Racial Profiling: Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Racism
Racial profiling in the United States arises from deeply ingrained stereotypes—often unconscious beliefs about the characteristics and behaviors of certain groups of people based on oversimplification and outright inaccuracy. Common stereotypes in the United States are based on a deeply rooted, historical philosophy of racial superiority and include the perceptions that people of color are less honest, less hardworking, and less intelligent than white people. Black people, particularly black males, are often stereotyped as irrational, violent, hypersexualized, and prone to criminal behavior. Latino Americans often encounter assumptions that they are in the nation illegally to work menial jobs or to profit from ties to drug trafficking. Muslims and people of Middle Eastern descent are frequently stereotyped as religious extremists and terrorists.
These stereotypes are rooted in the nation’s long history of discriminatory laws—including the legacy of slavery—and are intensified by twenty-first-century flashpoint issues, such as global terrorism and immigration. Family and community traditions, popular culture, media, and personal experience can all shape the stereotypes that people apply to others, especially to those who are somehow different from themselves. Such perceptions can contribute to prejudice and racism. Prejudice is a set of preconceived opinions, based on emotion rather than reason, about the traits and capacities of certain racial groups. Racism is a belief in the superiority of a particular race over others. Both prejudice and racism often exist at an unconscious level, and both are supported by institutional, cultural, legal, and economic practices.
The collective prejudices of individuals within society have influenced laws, business policies, and other institutional practices. Even when the people who created them are no longer involved, these attitudes and practices remain. These practices, in turn, influence the behavior of other individuals and create large-scale systems of racial bias. Fed by stereotyping, prejudice, and racism, racial profiling persists within these society-wide systems.
Racial profiling is intimately linked to white privilege, the institutionalized advantages that white (European American) people encounter in all aspects of American society and that translate into disadvantages for people of color. In particular, European Americans are far less likely than Americans of color to be suspected of criminal behavior—and far less likely to receive harsh treatment if they are arrested for or found guilty of a crime. According to civil rights advocate Jennifer Holladay, “White skin privilege serves several functions. First, it provides white people with ‘perks’ that [they] do not earn and that people of color do not enjoy. Second, it creates real advantages. . . . White people are immune to a lot of challenges. Finally, white privilege shapes the world in which we live—the way that we navigate and interact with one another and with the world.”
In an influential paper, “White Privilege and Male Privilege,” women’s studies scholar Peggy McIntosh of Wellesley College in Massachusetts identified forty-six ways in which a white person assumes a wide range of unspoken privileges. These include the following:
6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely and positively represented. . . .
15. I did not have to educate our children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection. . . .
21. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group. . . .
34. I can worry about racism without being seen as self-interested or selfseeking.
41. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.
Not everyone believes that white privilege plays a defining role in American life. Many Americans argue that they have achieved career success, financial security, or other assets through their own abilities and hard work—often in spite of significant hardships, such as poverty or class prejudice. In 2014 and 2015, filmmaker Whitney Dow created the Whiteness Project, a series of interviews with young white people about race and racism. One interviewee, twenty-one-year-old Mackenna, insisted, “Any benefit I’ve got is because it’s something I’ve worked hard for. . . . If I’m going to be benefiting from something it’s because . . . I have a good personality or I worked really hard for it or I’m experienced enough for it.”
A study published by the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that even seeing evidence of their advantages—and the corresponding disadvantages facing nonwhite people—did not convince European Americans of their own race privilege. The study’s authors reflected that white people are reluctant to recognize white privilege because they “are motivated to believe that . . . personal virtues determine life outcomes.”
Holladay and others contend that while many white individuals certainly do work hard, they also benefit—in sometimes unseen ways—from systems skewed in their favor based on their race, even though white privilege “is not something that white people necessarily do, create or enjoy on purpose.” The social-media topic “Criming While White,” which emerged on Twitter in 2014, highlighted everyday white privilege in action. To draw attention to racial double standards in the United States, white Twitter users offered personal stories of committing crimes and facing only mild consequences—or none at all. Sample tweets included “Arrested for DUI, cop took me to drive through ATM so I’d have money to bail myself out” and “Shoplifted when I was a teenager. Was apprehended but never charged because I looked ‘like a good kid.’”
Justifications for Racial Profiling
According to the ACLU, “Racial profiling is patently illegal, violating the US Constitution’s core promises of equal protection under the law to all and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures.” By contrast, many law enforcement agencies contend that racial profiling can be a valuable crime-fighting tool under certain circumstances. In some cases, profiling defenders argue, members of a certain racial or ethnic group are statistically more likely to engage in a particular kind of criminal behavior, and because police officers have limited time, they need to focus their attention and resources on those groups. For instance, on a federal level, immigration officials contend that a person of Latin American descent is more likely than a white person to be an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. “The immigration investigators have said, ‘We can’t do our job without taking ethnicity into account. We are very dependent on that,’” says an anonymous official at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the federal agency in charge of preventing terrorism, maintaining border security, and overseeing immigration laws.
FBI agents have applied the same reasoning to antiterrorism methods that involve racial profiling. If an agent is investigating a Somali-based militant Islamist group, for example, it would be logical to focus on areas in the United States with large Somali populations. Asra Nomani, a Muslim American journalism professor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, takes this view. “On issues of safety, profiling means making practical threat assessments,” she says. “It’s time that we, as a nation, ditch political correctness and choose pragmatism, recognizing that race, religion, and ethnicity can play an important role in criminality.”
Some scholars also note that if profiling reduces crime in the targeted community, it can be more helpful than hurtful to residents of color. Ethics expert Mathias Risse and political economist Richard Zeckhauser note how this argument applies to African American communities, pointing out that “historically, much police racism took the form of under-enforcement, ignoring black-on-black crime.” Theoretically, a more engaged police force will have an overall positive effect on residents’ safety, even if the tradeoff is an increase in racial profiling.
For some law enforcement officials, financial gain provides a powerful motivation for engaging in racial profiling. Police departments draw much of their revenue from ticketing, so some officers consider it in their best interest to issue as many tickets as possible. Officers may target people of color for traffic stops, believing these drivers are more likely to live in poverty—and therefore less likely to have automobile insurance, valid driver’s licenses, or properly working vehicle features (such as taillights). In profiling people of color, police may also assume that their targets will be unable to afford a lawyer to challenge the ticket in court. Michigan state trooper Craig Tuer alleges that these tactics are encouraged by police department training programs. “The police I do not believe for a minute are inherently racist,” Tuer says, “but the policies that are put in place reward a racist behavior.”
Police also gain revenue by confiscating and reselling property that they suspect the owner obtained illicitly. Cash, automobiles, and even homes can be seized by officers without proof of the owner’s wrongdoing. The money from property sales often goes toward departments’ operational costs, including officers’ salaries—giving individual police officers a powerful incentive to conduct seizures. Advocacy groups such as the ACLU argue that officers target people of color because they believe those individuals will be less likely to have the resources to challenge a seizure.
Arrests for drug-related offenses can be equally profitable for police departments. The federal government provides funding to state and local law enforcement agencies based partially on how many drug arrests they make. Civil rights advocate and Ohio State University law professor Michelle Alexander says that this results in police “stopping, frisking, searching as many people as possible, pulling over as many cars as possible, in order to boost their numbers up and ensure the funding stream will continue or increase.” The main targets are people of color, whom police and the public perceive to be more likely to use drugs. Police department supervisors often put pressure on officers to make a certain number of arrests each month or year. “It’s a numbers game,” says Julio Valentin, a retired New York police officer and a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “Commanders are trying to be proactive, or show that they’re being proactive, and here they have a system where [officers] are told, ‘Get those numbers [of stops and arrests] to where they should be and you’ll get your promotion.’”
Results of Racial Profiling
Numerous studies indicate that profiling based on race, religion, or ethnicity fails to deter crime in any significant way. In part, this is because law enforcement officials are acting on fundamentally flawed assumptions, such as the idea that black and Latino Americans commit more drug offenses than white citizens. Extensive studies by universities, government agencies, and independent research organizations have shown that people of color commit nonviolent crimes—such as traffic violations, drug-related offenses, and possession of weapons—at essentially the same rate as white people. Thus, profiling people of color as likely suspects in these types of crimes is generally ineffective.
In fact, some experts argue that when law enforcement agencies focus on race and ethnicity, they miss opportunities to track criminal behavior more efficiently. As University of Pittsburgh law professor David A. Harris notes, “If you want to know if somebody is involved in, say, transporting drugs on a highway, if you want to know whether somebody might be up to no good in an airport, you should watch with unrelenting intensity what they are doing, not what they look like—because that’s the only good predictor.”
Racial profiling also negatively affects crime prevention by undermining citizens’ trust in law enforcement. People of color are more likely than white people to view the US criminal justice system as unfair. A 2015 poll commissioned by the National Bar Association (an organization of attorneys) found that 88 percent of black Americans—compared to 59 percent of white Americans—believe police treat them unfairly. The perception that a police force is biased against people of color can create an atmosphere of tension, fear, and hostility, particularly in communities of color with high rates of crime. And racial profiling incidents leave lingering psychological scars on those who are targeted, deepening this sense of mistrust. As a result, residents may become unwilling to cooperate with law enforcement officers in solving crimes and in working toward common goals of safer and more peaceful communities. This sense of alienation can apply not only to local and state police departments but to US government agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security. Somali American activist Jaylani Hussein explains why many Muslim Americans, including Somalis, find it difficult to work constructively with federal agencies. “They want Somali leaders to be a part of task forces and have conversations about countering extremism, but they treat everyone like a suspect.”
The ACLU concludes, “Racial profiling is ineffective. It alienates communities from law enforcement, hinders community policing efforts, and causes law enforcement to lose credibility and trust among the people they are sworn to protect and serve.” In the minds of many Americans, the United States’ entire criminal justice system—and indeed the very fabric of society—is tainted by racial discrimination. While racial profiling is not the sole cause of this disillusionment, it is both a product of and a contributor to larger issues of American racial injustice.
Ilhan Omar (right), a Muslim American born in Somalia, ran for the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2016. Her campaign platform included calls for police reform, criminal justice reform, and other measures to combat institutional racism. She emphasized the need for law enforcement to work cooperatively and build trust with community members.