racial profiling statistics essay

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Racial Profiling is a Public Health and Health Disparities Issue

Cato t. laurencin.

1 Connecticut Convergence Institute for Translation in Regenerative Engineering, University of Connecticut Health Center, Farmington, CT 06030, USA

2 Raymond and Beverly Sackler Center for Biomedical, Biological, Physical and Engineering Sciences, Farmington, Connecticut, United States of America

3 Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, University of Connecticut Health Center, Farmington, Connecticut, United States of America

4 Department of Materials Science & Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, United States of America

5 Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, United States of America

6 Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, United States of America

Joanne M. Walker

Racial profiling is a public health and health disparities issue through its disparate and adverse health impact on those targeted by this practice, as well as members of their communities. We discuss six ways police profiling and racial discrimination adversely impact Black American health. We identify four direct and two indirect ways. Four direct ways are (1) violent confrontation with police that causes injury or death; (2) police language that escalates a confrontation through micro-aggressions or macroaggressions; (3) sub-lethal confrontations with police; (4) adverse health consequences of perceived or vicarious threat, i.e., the mere belief in potential harm by police injures health. There are two indirect ways: (5) through knowledge of or personal relationship with someone who directly experienced racial profiling; (6) through public events without a personal knowledge of the unarmed person threatened or killed by police as a result of racial profiling, but where such events cause both individuals and the community at large to perceive a threat. We support recognition of racial profiling as a public health and health disparities issue. We recommend support for community programs that address the clinical health effects of racial profiling. We also recommend widespread engagement of trauma-informed policing (TIP) that acknowledges the clinical effects of racial profiling.

1. Introduction

Racial profiling is the act of suspecting or targeting a person of a certain race on the basis of observed or assumed characteristics or behavior of a racial or ethnic group, rather than on individual suspicion [ 1 ]. Black Americans comprise 13% of the population and compared with White Americans are three times more likely to be shot and killed and five times more likely to be killed unarmed by police [ 2 , 3 ]. Black teens are 21 times more likely to be shot and killed by police than White teens [ 3 ]. In Black American boys between ages 15 and 19 and men between ages 20 and 39, the leading cause of death is homicide. Homicide is also the second leading cause of death in Black American young boys between ages 1 and 4 [ 4 ].

Excessive police violence can affect an individual personally and vicariously as well as the community which in turn adversely affects health. The most influential case that launched the “Black Lives Matters” movement was the case of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old boy who was unlawfully shot and killed walking home from a convenience store in 2012 [ 5 ]. In 2015, while in police custody, Freddie Grey, falsely accused of carrying an illegal switchblade, was refused medical attention upon his request which resulted in fatal injury and death [ 6 ]. The refusal of medical attention and the mistreatment while in police custody of this unarmed Black young man caused public health harms that included medication crises linked to the destruction of dozens of pharmacies, opioids from the pharmacies entering the illicit drug street market, mental health trauma, and damage to the economies of neighborhoods already burdened by high rates of unemployment and premature mortality [ 6 ]. Another influential case was that of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old woman who was pulled over by a police officer for not using a turn signal. Sandra Bland was arrested for allegedly assaulting an officer during the traffic stop and later found dead in her jail cell. Her death was ruled a suicide [ 5 ]. The officer involved was later indicted on perjury charges and fired [ 5 ]. The arrest of Sandra Bland and many others like her shows bias excessive force by police against African Americans. Have the police become unconsciously biased towards minorities through social conditioning or professional training that results in excessive suspicion of Black Americas? Violence as well as excessive police violence can greatly affect the health of an individual as well as a community causing public health and health disparity issues [ 7 ].

The senior one of us (C.T.L.) has served as a member of the Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition CTRP3 Task Force Advisory Board. The mission statement of the task force begins with the unambiguous statement of fact, “Racial Profiling has historically occurred, and continues to occur throughout America,” [ 8 ]. In this paper, we discuss several ways racial profiling causes’ adverse health effects in Black Americans ( Table 1 ).

Ways by which racial profiling results in health effects in Black Americans.

2. Six Ways of Racial Profiling Affecting Public Health

2.1. way 1: direct effect: confrontation with violence/injury by police resulting in death.

Racial profiling is indicative of the lasting prominence of institutionalization of racism in America. Many perceive police killings of unarmed persons or suspects as a manifestation of structural racism that implicitly assigns a lower value to Black lives [ 9 ]. These behaviors alienate communities from law enforcement, hinder community-policing effects, and cause communities to lose trust in law enforcement [ 9 ]. This negative interaction undermines effective community policing for public safety. Black Americans are three times more likely than White Americans to be shot and killed by police and five times more likely than White Americans to be killed unarmed [ 1 ]. Black Americans are also five times more likely to have a police intervention–related injury to take place [ 3 ]. According to a study by Gilbert et al., in 1994, 465 felons were killed by law enforcement officers in the line of duty, the killings were all considered justifiable homicides [ 10 ]. The number of deaths began to decrease over the next 10 years and surprisingly in 2013 were back up to 465 deaths according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports [ 10 ]. Throughout history, Black Americans have been portrayed as “monstrously aggressive and inhuman,” as was apparent in the testimony of the police officers in the killing of Michael Brown. The police officers involved portrayed Michael Brown as a “demonically aggressive, nonhuman monster,” and the media characterized him as a “thug” and a “gangster” [ 7 ]. Police violence and brutality can cause death which in turn affects the mental, physical, and emotional health of individuals as well as entire communities.

2.2. Way 2: Direct Effect: Confrontation Due to Police Language Micro-aggression/Macro-aggression by Police

The second direct effect of police racism is confrontation due to police language by micro- or macro-aggressions. Micro-aggressions are subtle, everyday verbal or nonverbal negative insults or messages to a person of a different race that may not be apparent or entirely understood to either party involved [ 11 ]. Macro-aggressions involve the act of racism towards every one of a certain race [ 11 ]. A number of reports have chronicled Black drivers perceiving more negative experiences in their interactions with police. An important study by Voigt, R., et al., focused on incidents captured on video involving police use of force on Black suspects. Voigt et al. completed an analysis using police body camera footage examined in the context of racial disparities. Officers were equal in formality between Black and White drivers but higher in respect with White drivers, with officers speaking with less respect to Black drivers [ 12 ]. A linguistic correlate from body camera footage data showed that White community members were 57% more likely to hear respectful utterances while Black community members were 61% more likely to hear a less respectful utterance from a police officer [ 12 ]. These factors lead to micro- and macro- aggressions that take place in the relationship between the police and the community.

2.3. Way 3: Direct Effect: Sub-lethal Confrontation with Police

The third direct effect is the sub-lethal confrontation with police that can involve anything from a police officer pulling a gun or yelling at an individual, to confrontations causing bodily injury. Several published studies have focused on exposure to police violence and the effects of that exposure on individuals. Police officers have the authority to stop individuals without any evidence of suspicion or wrong-doing [ 3 , 13 – 15 ]. “Terry stops” or “stop and frisk” rarely end with arrests and have been associated with adverse mental health effects such as stress responses or depressive symptoms due to police aggression [ 16 ]. Data from Geller et al. reported that ethnic minorities who have been stopped by police were more likely to have higher levels of anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); PTSD was higher in Black individuals [ 16 ]. Aggressive policing has major effects on the health of individuals and communities [ 16 ]. In the US population, police violence and aggression have been associated with distress, depression, anxiety, and trauma no matter the ethnicity or race of an individual [ 17 ]. Violence from racial profiling and discrimination was directly reported to cause depression in Black American boys and men, which in turn, is a mediator for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer [ 17 ]. Mental health of young Black boys was also associated with youth witnessed trauma regardless of proximity resulting in PTSD symptoms such as hyperarousal [ 17 ]. In recent studies, Oh et al. focused on the Black population and the effects of police mistreatment on individual health. The study showed police mistreatment of a Black individual was associated with worse mental health such as psychiatric, mood, and anxiety disorders, as well as PTSD and suicidal ideation, plans, and attempts [ 18 ]. Worse mental health can also be attributed to police killings of unarmed Black Americans and racial discrimination in communities not directly affected [ 3 ], causing stress, financial strain, and institutional oppressive practices [ 19 ]. African Americans (81%) who reported racial discrimination also reported having experienced PTSD [ 20 ]. Paired together, the data suggests, “law enforcement violence is a critical but nevertheless under examined public health issue” [ 20 ].

2.4. Way 4: Direct Effect: Actual and/or Perceived Threat from Police

The fourth area in which police brutality can affect mental health is the actual and/or perceived threat from police, the concept of vicarious threat. Several studies have examined the consequences of police violence and the effects it has on people who hear about the threat of violence [ 21 , 22 ]. Studies have focused on the mental and physical effects of vicarious threat. McFarland et al. focused on changes in waist circumference of Black Americans in Nashville, TN, who had been treated unlawfully by police [ 23 ]. The study showed that traffic stops occurred predominantly in low-income Black or Hispanic communities and that Black drivers were five times more likely to be stopped per year and two times more likely to be searched during a traffic stop [ 23 ]. McFarland et al. determined that Black Americans were two to three times more likely to have a larger waist circumference than White Americans. Black Americans in general are faced with higher stress burdens than White Americans [ 23 ]. Unfair treatment by police is a stressor that has not yet fully been understood in terms of health disparities research and in the medical field [ 23 ]. Unfair treatment by police has a large effect on the Black community vicariously and personally. In one study, 45.8% of Black Americans experienced personal or vicarious unfair treatment versus 18.5% of Whites, with men reporting more personal unfair treatment and women reporting more vicarious unfair treatment [ 23 ]. Waist circumference was higher in Blacks who experience unfair treatment and higher (12%) in Black women who experienced it vicariously compared with White women [ 23 ]. Vicarious exposure to unfair treatment by police may be a factor of worse mental health in the Black community [ 23 ].

2.5. Way 5: Indirect Effect: Case Where There Is Knowledge/Relationship of an Individual Who Has Been Racially Profiled by the Police

Indirect effects on mental health from police mistreatment can occur to someone who has knowledge of or a relationship with an individual that has been mistreated or racially profiled. Physiological effects can take place due to defending the character of a loved one after the police have killed them [ 3 ]. These actions can elicit negative emotions that can be damaging to mental health [ 24 ]. The mental health effect on the knowledge or relationship one may have to someone who has been racially profiled has also been evident in young Black American boys. Boys who were interviewed on police violence were all aware that they can be targeted by a police officer and killed without any legal consequence; the exposure to this violence causes trauma [ 17 ]. Young Black boys are taught to stay out of trouble, be respectful, and avoid any confrontation with the police for fear of being mistakenly targeted and racially profiled [ 17 ]. Most recently, a study published in Science Advances focused on birth records in California from 2007 to 2016 and showed that police killings of unarmed Black men were associated with a decrease in birth weight and gestational age of Black infants [ 25 ]. For a pregnant mother, the stressors of knowing someone or hearing about police racial profiling can cause stress and have negative effects on an unborn child [ 25 ]. These emotional stressors on Black women can cause physical health to decline and can be responsible for changes in birth weight and length of gestation, in an unborn child [ 25 ]. In general, studies show that stressors in an early prenatal stage can have damaging effects to an unborn child causing consequences on childhood and adulthood development [ 26 ]. The data suggests that the killings of unarmed Black Americans are linked to decreased birth weights in Black infants but not in other races, accounting for a third of the Black- White gap, indicating the effect is race specific and driven by perceptions of discrimination and structural racism [ 26 ].

2.6. Way 6: Indirect Effect: Case Where There Is No Relationship with an Unarmed Individual Who Has Been Killed by Police and the Effects on the Community

Racial profiling by police can have consequences on health even when there is no relationship to the person who has been racially profiled, but there is knowledge through the media and the community. When unarmed Black members of a community are killed, could it mediate adverse mental health issues within the community? Bor et al. focused on police killings and the effects on the mental health of Black Americans [ 3 ]. This study compared the mental health of Black Americans after a police killing of an unarmed Black American to the mental health before that event or 3 months after the event. The outcome variable that was measured was the number of days in the previous month that the respondent’s mental health was reported “not good” [ 3 ]. Killings of unarmed Black Americans were associated with worse mental health among other Black Americans, even if the Black Americans did not know the person who was killed, while no change occurred in White Americans. The killing of armed Black Americans was not associated with the mental health of Black or White Americans [ 3 ]. The effect of police brutality and mistreatment can be widespread and affect people who have only heard about the event [ 3 ]. This can trigger an individual to relive negative experiences causing stress and anxiety and can even cause the individual to worry about their safety and their families’ safety. Hearing about the event through the media or the community can also have adverse effects on an individual.

3. Discussion

Police violence experienced by racial minorities can cause adverse health consequences through stress, trauma, and anxiety [ 26 ]. Public health officials and policymakers need to treat racial profiling and adverse policing as true public health issues and recognize the scenarios in which medical effects can take place in Black Americans and minorities. There is a significant need to implement programs that mitigate the adverse mental health spillover caused by harmful police acts. The value of educating the public is important because Black Americans and other minorities are encountering clinical medical effects and many do not understand why [ 27 ]. We have two major recommendations. First, adequate public health resources need to be utilized to understand, diagnose, and address the health implications of racial profiling. Second, for police, while most traffic stops are lawful and do not involve racial profiling in our view, the 6 ways in which racial profiling produces medical effects will inform subsequent traffic stop interactions. We, therefore, need to educate law enforcement on the importance of Trauma Informed Policing (TIP) [ 28 ]. Trauma Informed Policing is defined as a framework for police officers to recognize and appropriately address the complexities of trauma experienced by survivors, to acknowledge symptoms and to use response tactics accordingly to prevent further individual trauma [ 28 ]. Several approaches have already been implemented in the use of trauma information such as the Trauma Informed Approach, referred to as Trauma Informed Care (TIC) which we can learn from and adopt in TIP [ 29 ]. The four Rs framework from the Trauma Informed Approach can be implemented for TIP. Officers can be trained to Realize the widespread impact of trauma and the different effects it may have on certain racial populations; Recognize the signs and symptoms of trauma; Respond by fully integrating experiences and knowledge about trauma into policies, procedures, and practices; and Resist retraumatization [ 29 ]. Police officers with TIP training will have the skills to approach situations with caution and care as well as awareness that many racial ethnic groups have a history of trauma and will be able to respond to agitated people in a nonjudgmental and supportive way. Relationships with police may trigger a response based on past experiences, personal or vicarious, that are not related to a current stop triggering PTSD, trauma, or stress causing an adverse reaction at the time of the police stop. Officers with TIP training will be able to recognize trauma and approach situations safely and be aware of cultural sensitivity as well as historical trauma that may impact entire communities [ 29 ]. In sum, the major focus needs to be on reducing disparities in health and promoting a culture of health. It is imperative for police and the community to understand the dynamics of racial profiling and its effects on public health.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge support from National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH BUILD (RL5GM118969) and NIH PIONEER (DP1AR068147) for funding this work (C.T.L.).

Conflict of Interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Compliance with Ethical Standards

Ethical Approval This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

Informed Consent Not applicable.

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Solving racial disparities in policing

Colleen Walsh

Harvard Staff Writer

Experts say approach must be comprehensive as roots are embedded in culture

“ Unequal ” is a multipart series highlighting the work of Harvard faculty, staff, students, alumni, and researchers on issues of race and inequality across the U.S. The first part explores the experience of people of color with the criminal justice legal system in America.

It seems there’s no end to them. They are the recent videos and reports of Black and brown people beaten or killed by law enforcement officers, and they have fueled a national outcry over the disproportionate use of excessive, and often lethal, force against people of color, and galvanized demands for police reform.

This is not the first time in recent decades that high-profile police violence — from the 1991 beating of Rodney King to the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in 2014 — ignited calls for change. But this time appears different. The police killings of Breonna Taylor in March, George Floyd in May, and a string of others triggered historic, widespread marches and rallies across the nation, from small towns to major cities, drawing protesters of unprecedented diversity in race, gender, and age.

According to historians and other scholars, the problem is embedded in the story of the nation and its culture. Rooted in slavery, racial disparities in policing and police violence, they say, are sustained by systemic exclusion and discrimination, and fueled by implicit and explicit bias. Any solution clearly will require myriad new approaches to law enforcement, courts, and community involvement, and comprehensive social change driven from the bottom up and the top down.

While police reform has become a major focus, the current moment of national reckoning has widened the lens on systemic racism for many Americans. The range of issues, though less familiar to some, is well known to scholars and activists. Across Harvard, for instance, faculty members have long explored the ways inequality permeates every aspect of American life. Their research and scholarship sits at the heart of a new Gazette series starting today aimed at finding ways forward in the areas of democracy; wealth and opportunity; environment and health; and education. It begins with this first on policing.

Harvard Kennedy School Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad traces the history of policing in America to “slave patrols” in the antebellum South, in which white citizens were expected to help supervise the movements of enslaved Black people.

Photo by Martha Stewart

The history of racialized policing

Like many scholars, Khalil Gibran Muhammad , professor of history, race, and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School , traces the history of policing in America to “slave patrols” in the antebellum South, in which white citizens were expected to help supervise the movements of enslaved Black people. This legacy, he believes, can still be seen in policing today. “The surveillance, the deputization essentially of all white men to be police officers or, in this case, slave patrollers, and then to dispense corporal punishment on the scene are all baked in from the very beginning,” he  told NPR  last year.

Slave patrols, and the slave codes they enforced, ended after the Civil War and the passage of the 13th amendment, which formally ended slavery “except as a punishment for crime.” But Muhammad notes that former Confederate states quickly used that exception to justify new restrictions. Known as the Black codes, the various rules limited the kinds of jobs African Americans could hold, their rights to buy and own property, and even their movements.

“The genius of the former Confederate states was to say, ‘Oh, well, if all we need to do is make them criminals and they can be put back in slavery, well, then that’s what we’ll do.’ And that’s exactly what the Black codes set out to do. The Black codes, for all intents and purposes, criminalized every form of African American freedom and mobility, political power, economic power, except the one thing it didn’t criminalize was the right to work for a white man on a white man’s terms.” In particular, he said the Ku Klux Klan “took about the business of terrorizing, policing, surveilling, and controlling Black people. … The Klan totally dominates the machinery of justice in the South.”

When, during what became known as the Great Migration, millions of African Americans fled the still largely agrarian South for opportunities in the thriving manufacturing centers of the North, they discovered that metropolitan police departments tended to enforce the law along racial and ethnic lines, with newcomers overseen by those who came before. “There was an early emphasis on people whose status was just a tiny notch better than the folks whom they were focused on policing,” Muhammad said. “And so the Anglo-Saxons are policing the Irish or the Germans are policing the Irish. The Irish are policing the Poles.” And then arrived a wave of Black Southerners looking for a better life.

In his groundbreaking work, “ The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America ,” Muhammad argues that an essential turning point came in the early 1900s amid efforts to professionalize police forces across the nation, in part by using crime statistics to guide law enforcement efforts. For the first time, Americans with European roots were grouped into one broad category, white, and set apart from the other category, Black.

Citing Muhammad’s research, Harvard historian Jill Lepore  has summarized the consequences this way : “Police patrolled Black neighborhoods and arrested Black people disproportionately; prosecutors indicted Black people disproportionately; juries found Black people guilty disproportionately; judges gave Black people disproportionately long sentences; and, then, after all this, social scientists, observing the number of Black people in jail, decided that, as a matter of biology, Black people were disproportionately inclined to criminality.”

“History shows that crime data was never objective in any meaningful sense,” Muhammad wrote. Instead, crime statistics were “weaponized” to justify racial profiling, police brutality, and ever more policing of Black people.

This phenomenon, he believes, has continued well into this century and is exemplified by William J. Bratton, one of the most famous police leaders in recent America history. Known as “America’s Top Cop,” Bratton led police departments in his native Boston, Los Angeles, and twice in New York, finally retiring in 2016.

Bratton rejected notions that crime was a result of social and economic forces, such as poverty, unemployment, police practices, and racism. Instead, he said in a 2017 speech, “It is about behavior.” Through most of his career, he was a proponent of statistically-based “predictive” policing — essentially placing forces in areas where crime numbers were highest, focused on the groups found there.

Bratton argued that the technology eliminated the problem of prejudice in policing, without ever questioning potential bias in the data or algorithms themselves — a significant issue given the fact that Black Americans are arrested and convicted of crimes at disproportionately higher rates than whites. This approach has led to widely discredited practices such as racial profiling and “stop-and-frisk.” And, Muhammad notes, “There is no research consensus on whether or how much violence dropped in cities due to policing.”

Gathering numbers

In 2015 The Washington Post began tracking every fatal shooting by an on-duty officer, using news stories, social media posts, and police reports in the wake of the fatal police shooting of Brown, a Black teenager in Ferguson, Mo. According to the newspaper, Black Americans are killed by police at twice the rate of white Americans, and Hispanic Americans are also killed by police at a disproportionate rate.

Such efforts have proved useful for researchers such as economist Rajiv Sethi .

A Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard  Radcliffe Institute , Sethi is investigating the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers, a difficult task given that data from such encounters is largely unavailable from police departments. Instead, Sethi and his team of researchers have turned to information collected by websites and news organizations including The Washington Post and The Guardian, merged with data from other sources such as the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Census, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Rajiv Sethi is investigating the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers,

Courtesy photo

They have found that exposure to deadly force is highest in the Mountain West and Pacific regions relative to the mid-Atlantic and northeastern states, and that racial disparities in relation to deadly force are even greater than the national numbers imply. “In the country as a whole, you’re about two to three times more likely to face deadly force if you’re Black than if you are white” said Sethi. “But if you look at individual cities separately, disparities in exposure are much higher.”

Examining the characteristics associated with police departments that experience high numbers of lethal encounters is one way to better understand and address racial disparities in policing and the use of violence, Sethi said, but it’s a massive undertaking given the decentralized nature of policing in America. There are roughly 18,000 police departments in the country, and more than 3,000 sheriff’s offices, each with its own approaches to training and selection.

“They behave in very different ways, and what we’re finding in our current research is that they are very different in the degree to which they use deadly force,” said Sethi. To make real change, “You really need to focus on the agency level where organizational culture lies, where selection and training protocols have an effect, and where leadership can make a difference.”

Sethi pointed to the example of Camden, N.J., which disbanded and replaced its police force in 2013, initially in response to a budget crisis, but eventually resulting in an effort to fundamentally change the way the police engaged with the community. While there have been improvements, including greater witness cooperation, lower crime, and fewer abuse complaints, the Camden case doesn’t fit any particular narrative, said Sethi, noting that the number of officers actually increased as part of the reform. While the city is still faced with its share of problems, Sethi called its efforts to rethink policing “important models from which we can learn.”

Fighting vs. preventing crime

For many analysts, the real problem with policing in America is the fact that there is simply too much of it. “We’ve seen since the mid-1970s a dramatic increase in expenditures that are associated with expanding the criminal legal system, including personnel and the tasks we ask police to do,” said Sandra Susan Smith , Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice at HKS, and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute. “And at the same time we see dramatic declines in resources devoted to social welfare programs.”

“You can have all the armored personnel carriers you want in Ferguson, but public safety is more likely to come from redressing environmental pollution, poor education, and unfair work,” said Brandon Terry, assistant professor of African and African American Studies and social studies.

Kris Snibble/Harvard file photo

Smith’s comment highlights a key argument embraced by many activists and experts calling for dramatic police reform: diverting resources from the police to better support community services including health care, housing, and education, and stronger economic and job opportunities. They argue that broader support for such measures will decrease the need for policing, and in turn reduce violent confrontations, particularly in over-policed, economically disadvantaged communities, and communities of color.

For Brandon Terry , that tension took the form of an ice container during his Baltimore high school chemistry final. The frozen cubes were placed in the middle of the classroom to help keep the students cool as a heat wave sent temperatures soaring. “That was their solution to the building’s lack of air conditioning,” said Terry, a Harvard assistant professor of African and African American Studies and social studies. “Just grab an ice cube.”

Terry’s story is the kind many researchers cite to show the negative impact of underinvesting in children who will make up the future population, and instead devoting resources toward policing tactics that embrace armored vehicles, automatic weapons, and spy planes. Terry’s is also the kind of tale promoted by activists eager to defund the police, a movement begun in the late 1960s that has again gained momentum as the death toll from violent encounters mounts. A scholar of Martin Luther King Jr., Terry said the Civil Rights leader’s views on the Vietnam War are echoed in the calls of activists today who are pressing to redistribute police resources.

“King thought that the idea of spending many orders of magnitude more for an unjust war than we did for the abolition of poverty and the abolition of ghettoization was a moral travesty, and it reflected a kind of sickness at the core of our society,” said Terry. “And part of what the defund model is based upon is a similar moral criticism, that these budgets reflect priorities that we have, and our priorities are broken.”

Terry also thinks the policing debate needs to be expanded to embrace a fuller understanding of what it means for people to feel truly safe in their communities. He highlights the work of sociologist Chris Muller and Harvard’s Robert Sampson, who have studied racial disparities in exposures to lead and the connections between a child’s early exposure to the toxic metal and antisocial behavior. Various studies have shown that lead exposure in children can contribute to cognitive impairment and behavioral problems, including heightened aggression.

“You can have all the armored personnel carriers you want in Ferguson,” said Terry, “but public safety is more likely to come from redressing environmental pollution, poor education, and unfair work.”

Policing and criminal justice system

Alexandra Natapoff , Lee S. Kreindler Professor of Law, sees policing as inexorably linked to the country’s criminal justice system and its long ties to racism.

“Policing does not stand alone or apart from how we charge people with crimes, or how we convict them, or how we treat them once they’ve been convicted,” she said. “That entire bundle of official practices is a central part of how we govern, and in particular, how we have historically governed Black people and other people of color, and economically and socially disadvantaged populations.”

Unpacking such a complicated issue requires voices from a variety of different backgrounds, experiences, and fields of expertise who can shine light on the problem and possible solutions, said Natapoff, who co-founded a new lecture series with HLS Professor Andrew Crespo titled “ Policing in America .”

In recent weeks the pair have hosted Zoom discussions on topics ranging from qualified immunity to the Black Lives Matter movement to police unions to the broad contours of the American penal system. The series reflects the important work being done around the country, said Natapoff, and offers people the chance to further “engage in dialogue over these over these rich, complicated, controversial issues around race and policing, and governance and democracy.”

Courts and mass incarceration

Much of Natapoff’s recent work emphasizes the hidden dangers of the nation’s misdemeanor system. In her book “ Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal ,” Natapoff shows how the practice of stopping, arresting, and charging people with low-level offenses often sends them down a devastating path.

“This is how most people encounter the criminal apparatus, and it’s the first step of mass incarceration, the initial net that sweeps people of color disproportionately into the criminal system,” said Natapoff. “It is also the locus that overexposes Black people to police violence. The implications of this enormous net of police and prosecutorial authority around minor conduct is central to understanding many of the worst dysfunctions of our criminal system.”

One consequence is that Black and brown people are incarcerated at much higher rates than white people. America has approximately 2.3 million people in federal, state, and local prisons and jails, according to a 2020 report from the nonprofit the Prison Policy Initiative. According to a 2018 report from the Sentencing Project, Black men are 5.9 times as likely to be incarcerated as white men and Hispanic men are 3.1 times as likely.

Reducing mass incarceration requires shrinking the misdemeanor net “along all of its axes” said Natapoff, who supports a range of reforms including training police officers to both confront and arrest people less for low-level offenses, and the policies of forward-thinking prosecutors willing to “charge fewer of those offenses when police do make arrests.”

She praises the efforts of Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins in Massachusetts and George Gascón, the district attorney in Los Angeles County, Calif., who have pledged to stop prosecuting a range of misdemeanor crimes such as resisting arrest, loitering, trespassing, and drug possession. “If cities and towns across the country committed to that kind of reform, that would be a profoundly meaningful change,” said Natapoff, “and it would be a big step toward shrinking our entire criminal apparatus.”

Retired U.S. Judge Nancy Gertner cites the need to reform federal sentencing guidelines, arguing that all too often they have been proven to be biased and to result in packing the nation’s jails and prisons.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard file photo

Sentencing reform

Another contributing factor in mass incarceration is sentencing disparities.

A recent Harvard Law School study found that, as is true nationally, people of color are “drastically overrepresented in Massachusetts state prisons.” But the report also noted that Black and Latinx people were less likely to have their cases resolved through pretrial probation ­— a way to dismiss charges if the accused meet certain conditions — and receive much longer sentences than their white counterparts.

Retired U.S. Judge Nancy Gertner also notes the need to reform federal sentencing guidelines, arguing that all too often they have been proven to be biased and to result in packing the nation’s jails and prisons. She points to the way the 1994 Crime Bill (legislation sponsored by then-Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware) ushered in much harsher drug penalties for crack than for powder cocaine. This tied the hands of judges issuing sentences and disproportionately punished people of color in the process. “The disparity in the treatment of crack and cocaine really was backed up by anecdote and stereotype, not by data,” said Gertner, a lecturer at HLS. “There was no data suggesting that crack was infinitely more dangerous than cocaine. It was the young Black predator narrative.”

The First Step Act, a bipartisan prison reform bill aimed at reducing racial disparities in drug sentencing and signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2018, is just what its name implies, said Gertner.

“It reduces sentences to the merely inhumane rather than the grotesque. We still throw people in jail more than anybody else. We still resort to imprisonment, rather than thinking of other alternatives. We still resort to punishment rather than other models. None of that has really changed. I don’t deny the significance of somebody getting out of prison a year or two early, but no one should think that that’s reform.”

 Not just bad apples

Reform has long been a goal for federal leaders. Many heralded Obama-era changes aimed at eliminating racial disparities in policing and outlined in the report by The President’s Task Force on 21st Century policing. But HKS’s Smith saw them as largely symbolic. “It’s a nod to reform. But most of the reforms that are implemented in this country tend to be reforms that nibble around the edges and don’t really make much of a difference.”

Efforts such as diversifying police forces and implicit bias training do little to change behaviors and reduce violent conduct against people of color, said Smith, who cites studies suggesting a majority of Americans hold negative biases against Black and brown people, and that unconscious prejudices and stereotypes are difficult to erase.

“Experiments show that you can, in the context of a day, get people to think about race differently, and maybe even behave differently. But if you follow up, say, a week, or two weeks later, those effects are gone. We don’t know how to produce effects that are long-lasting. We invest huge amounts to implement such police reforms, but most often there’s no empirical evidence to support their efficacy.”

Even the early studies around the effectiveness of body cameras suggest the devices do little to change “officers’ patterns of behavior,” said Smith, though she cautions that researchers are still in the early stages of collecting and analyzing the data.

And though police body cameras have caught officers in unjust violence, much of the general public views the problem as anomalous.

“Despite what many people in low-income communities of color think about police officers, the broader society has a lot of respect for police and thinks if you just get rid of the bad apples, everything will be fine,” Smith added. “The problem, of course, is this is not just an issue of bad apples.”

Efforts such as diversifying police forces and implicit bias training do little to change behaviors and reduce violent conduct against people of color, said Sandra Susan Smith, a professor of criminal justice Harvard Kennedy School.

Community-based ways forward

Still Smith sees reason for hope and possible ways forward involving a range of community-based approaches. As part of the effort to explore meaningful change, Smith, along with Christopher Winship , Diker-Tishman Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and a member of the senior faculty at HKS, have organized “ Reimagining Community Safety: A Program in Criminal Justice Speaker Series ” to better understand the perspectives of practitioners, policymakers, community leaders, activists, and academics engaged in public safety reform.

Some community-based safety models have yielded important results. Smith singles out the Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets program (known as CAHOOTS ) in Eugene, Ore., which supplements police with a community-based public safety program. When callers dial 911 they are often diverted to teams of workers trained in crisis resolution, mental health, and emergency medicine, who are better equipped to handle non-life-threatening situations. The numbers support her case. In 2017 the program received 25,000 calls, only 250 of which required police assistance. Training similar teams of specialists who don’t carry weapons to handle all traffic stops could go a long way toward ending violent police encounters, she said.

“Imagine you have those kinds of services in play,” said Smith, paired with community-based anti-violence program such as Cure Violence , which aims to stop violence in targeted neighborhoods by using approaches health experts take to control disease, such as identifying and treating individuals and changing social norms. Together, she said, these programs “could make a huge difference.”

At Harvard Law School, students have been  studying how an alternate 911-response team  might function in Boston. “We were trying to move from thinking about a 911-response system as an opportunity to intervene in an acute moment, to thinking about what it would look like to have a system that is trying to help reweave some of the threads of community, a system that is more focused on healing than just on stopping harm” said HLS Professor Rachel Viscomi, who directs the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program and oversaw the research.

The forthcoming report, compiled by two students in the HLS clinic, Billy Roberts and Anna Vande Velde, will offer officials a range of ideas for how to think about community safety that builds on existing efforts in Boston and other cities, said Viscomi.

But Smith, like others, knows community-based interventions are only part of the solution. She applauds the Justice Department’s investigation into the Ferguson Police Department after the shooting of Brown. The 102-page report shed light on the department’s discriminatory policing practices, including the ways police disproportionately targeted Black residents for tickets and fines to help balance the city’s budget. To fix such entrenched problems, state governments need to rethink their spending priorities and tax systems so they can provide cities and towns the financial support they need to remain debt-free, said Smith.

Rethinking the 911-response system to being one that is “more focused on healing than just on stopping harm” is part of the student-led research under the direction of Law School Professor Rachel Viscomi, who heads up the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program.

Jon Chase/Harvard file photo

“Part of the solution has to be a discussion about how government is funded and how a city like Ferguson got to a place where government had so few resources that they resorted to extortion of their residents, in particular residents of color, in order to make ends meet,” she said. “We’ve learned since that Ferguson is hardly the only municipality that has struggled with funding issues and sought to address them through the oppression and repression of their politically, socially, and economically marginalized Black and Latino residents.”

Police contracts, she said, also need to be reexamined. The daughter of a “union man,” Smith said she firmly supports officers’ rights to union representation to secure fair wages, health care, and safe working conditions. But the power unions hold to structure police contracts in ways that protect officers from being disciplined for “illegal and unethical behavior” needs to be challenged, she said.

“I think it’s incredibly important for individuals to be held accountable and for those institutions in which they are embedded to hold them to account. But we routinely find that union contracts buffer individual officers from having to be accountable. We see this at the level of the Supreme Court as well, whose rulings around qualified immunity have protected law enforcement from civil suits. That needs to change.”

Other Harvard experts agree. In an opinion piece in The Boston Globe last June, Tomiko Brown-Nagin , dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at HLS, pointed out the Court’s “expansive interpretation of qualified immunity” and called for reform that would “promote accountability.”

“This nation is devoted to freedom, to combating racial discrimination, and to making government accountable to the people,” wrote Brown-Nagin. “Legislators today, like those who passed landmark Civil Rights legislation more than 50 years ago, must take a stand for equal justice under law. Shielding police misconduct offends our fundamental values and cannot be tolerated.”

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What the data say about police brutality and racial bias — and which reforms might work

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For 9 minutes and 29 seconds, Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into the neck of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man. This deadly use of force by the now-former Minneapolis police officer has reinvigorated a very public debate about police brutality and racism.

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Update 26 May 2021 : On 20 April 2021, Derek Chauvin was convicted of causing the death of George Floyd. The text has been modified to include updated information on how long Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck.

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Analyzing Police Misconduct: The Data Behind Racial Profiling

The police killings of George Floyd and other African-American civilians have generated numerous studies and policy briefs on the roots of police misconduct. But while many identify racial profiling as a driver for these tragedies, few truly understand its role in policing, much less how to eradicate it.

Alejandro Del Carmen, Associate Dean of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Tarleton State University in Fort Worth, Tx., believes it all comes down to the data.

An instructor in the Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas, Del Carmen has spent the last two decades using data and statistical analysis to train and educate thousands of police officers, and every police chief in Texas, on proper policing practices. He has worked as a federal monitor overseeing federal consent decrees in New Orleans and Puerto Rico.

In his new book, Racial Profiling In Policing: Beyond The Basics , Del Carmen uses data, along with his expert knowledge and experience, to provide an objective and neutral basis for an in-depth discussion of race, racism and policing in America.

In a recent conversation with The Crime Report , Del Carmen discussed why a meaningful conversation on racial profiling cannot happen without first acknowledging the lived experiences of African Americans, why efforts to train police about implicit bias are often unsuccessful, and what city officials need to do if they want police departments that are sensitive to these issues.

This is an edited and abridged version of the conversation.

The Crime Report: Why did you decide to write this book?

Alejandro Del Carmen: I’ve devoted 22 years of my life to the study of racism generally and, specifically, racial profiling in policing. As a first-generation immigrant to the United States from Nicaragua who endured civil war and communism, I realized that there was a different battle going on here: a battle of racism. I kept telling myself that at least in Nicaragua I knew who the enemy was and where the bullets were coming from. But in the U.S. you really didn’t know.  You could show up somewhere and people would question what you were doing there because of the way you looked. Even as a 12- year-old, having endured what most people shouldn’t, I was intrigued by the notion that a great country like the United States, with its Constitution and all the ideals that it represents, could allow such behavior to take place.

The next question that preoccupied me, as a social scientist and criminologist, was how can we really understand this and identify it. In order to eradicate racial profiling, you have to know what it looks like. Everybody seems to know what racism in policing looks like, but very few people understand how to get rid of it, or even whether or not what they’re seeing is in fact racism. One of the questions I had to answer was how could I speak to the American people, to the consumer of information who doesn’t have a Ph.D., who doesn’t wear a badge, from a scientific perspective? That’s where the book came from. It’s an honest dialogue with the science.

TCR: The book starts off with a history lesson on racial profiling in this country. Why do you feel it is so important to understand how racial profiling actually became encoded into the DNA of our country?

ADC: We cannot understand our current state of affairs, relevant to racism, without fully understanding the history of how we got here. How can you talk about George Floyd without understanding the perspective of the African-American experience in the United States?

When I train police chiefs in Texas, I always explain that when an African-American shows up anywhere they have to write a check, they are often writing the last name of a slave owner. You cannot disinherit that reality from the African-American experience. Caucasians can afford to ignore that history. But for a person of color, particularly black people in this country, that is the reality they face every day.

Regardless of which side of the aisle you’re on, or what political agenda you follow, you cannot disinherit the reality of what African Americans went through as slaves, how they were brought here against their will, sold in town squares based on appearances and abilities, how families were torn apart, how women were raped. It made sense to inform anyone who reads this book on history first before we can even talk about racism today.

TCR: How does the culture of policing in both the past and present reflect a narrow and white-washed understanding of reality?

ADC: When you look at the history of policing, and the model that is in place right now, you have to remember that policing was organized to address crimes committed by the less-than-average citizen. They were never meant to look for the white-collar criminal. In many ways the history of policing is of a paramilitary structure established to protect the economic interests and property of the wealthy.

You can spin it and say that they have the best interests of the common folks in mind, that they address violent crime. All of that may be true, but all of that is collateral. The concept of police was to protect property and communities of propertied human beings. If you are not part of that community, then you are seen as a threat. Add to that somebody who doesn’t look like most people, who presents themselves differently, plus the fact that human beings fear what we do not know, and you end up with racism.

And this is to no fault of law enforcement personnel, but look at who the job enlisted. It enlisted individuals who were physically strong.  In New York and Boston, the Irish lined up and used law enforcement as a way to empower themselves as a minority. I have written that Hispanics have become the new Irish in America. A lot of Hispanic immigrants today have found that law enforcement is a way to not only become a citizen who is accepted by the community, but also a source of authority.

That is what the Irish did to empower themselves as people. Law enforcement became a job for blue-collar workers, who were very strong, and who wanted to empower themselves. And it had good pay and decent retirement. So, instead of a path to contribute to society, it became an avenue to get ahead while enforcing the laws of the wealthy and propertied.

Since its inception, policing has lent itself to racist tendencies. Even today, who does law enforcement attract? On one hand, really good people, but on another hand, people who don’t have the criteria of the Constitution in mind and who certainly don’t feel that equality is part of that Constitution.

TCR: Your book focuses on the need for data when tackling the issue of racial profiling. How do you police departments fail when it comes to data analysis?

ADC: When police officers tell me that they’re reviewing bodycam or dashcam videos to identify if racial profiling occurred, I often ask them what that looks like and I get a blank stare from some because they think I’m asking them the obvious. But absent a situation like Rodney King, where you have white cops beating down a black man in the street, how do you identify racial profiling when part of the equation is the intent of the officer? That’s where data comes in. Data is a substantial part of the equation, but it isn’t a cure-all resource. If I’m a medical doctor, and I were to gauge your temperature, and you’re at 100 degrees, I would not say that you’re dying from cancer or have COVID. I would have to look for other symptoms and then begin the process of deduction to figure out what you’re suffering from.

In that same way, data is an indicator. And a strong indicator. Many police departments collect data, and collect a lot of data. Some chiefs in Boston, Chicago and New York brag about how much data they collect. The calamity that I see across the U.S. is the fact that very few data points are actually reviewed and analyzed. Police departments generally collect all of this data in reports that are cosmetically friendly; they have graphics and percentages that the common consumer of data can look at and consider informative. But how can a department allow individuals like the officers that ended up killing George Floyd to go out on the street?  I guarantee that the data points are there and if somebody had been paying attention to them they could have flagged this individual and got him off the streets.

They get the data points so they can inform the public, give them a nice report, get their crime analysts to do a dog-and-pony show, but does that data become an actionable component used to direct policy, affect the way departments conduct every day operations, and affect the behavior of police officers?  We see toolsets like early warning systems, Comstat, sophisticated software programs used to fight crime, predict crime, and figure out where officers are psychologically and behaviorally; but there are still thousands of data points that are being missed.

The irony is that they spend millions of dollars on this software and no one is looking at them from a critical perspective to look for what we call patterns and practices. What happens across the department? What are some of the things we are seeing? Why is use of force utilized excessively in this area of town if the crime in that area is very low? Why is it that in minority areas there seems to be an overzealous component where more tickets are given than in other areas?

That’s where the data comes in. These are important questions that could have legitimate answers but they’re not being asked.

TCR: Where does the responsibility lie to ask these questions?

ADC: Police chiefs are responsible to city management. There are roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies around the U.S.. The FBI estimates about a million officers are on the streets today. Most of these agencies are in remote, rural areas and report to a small city council.

Most of the people in that council don’t have the ability to understand what is at stake. They think that the traditional role of law enforcement, to protect and serve, is the primary objective. The key is for the population and leadership of any town or city to ask their police command staff the right question: is the Constitution being adhered to? Are we engaging in best practices? Are our police officers being trained by the best sources and being held accountable for that training? Instead, what usually ends up happening is an exercise of cosmetic surgery. Cosmetically, the department has really nice uniforms, really nice patrol cars, wonderful facilities, great policies that they’ve borrowed and copied, and advanced software systems. From this perspective, the department is amazing.

But go deeper than that. What do they do with that great-looking tech and data? They have policies in place, but does the average officer understand them? A lot of police officers don’t, but they’ve signed off on them because they’ve read them. Accountability is a big word. How do you ensure that the command staff holds their troops accountable? If no one is holding the command staff accountable they’re not going to hold anyone else accountable. That dysfunctionality begins with the city leadership.

There are models out there in places where departments are beginning to understand that it’s not just what they do, but what they don’t do that needs to be addressed. That is also an issue of city leadership because they’re the ones that hire and fire the chief. Who do they hire? Is someone who looks good on paper really the best person for the job from an accountability perspective?

TCR: How do the courts often fail when it comes to utilizing data in their decisions?

ADC: There is a divide between lawyers and those of us who are data-driven scholars. When lawyers engage in a racism lawsuit, they do so from the legal basis of what’s been violated and how much money is the client consequently going to receive. For us, it’s an issue of how do we know if that violation is scientifically there.

My role is very difficult. I end up making everybody upset. I walk in a courtroom or I talk to the city counsel, and I’m either too soft on the cops or too harsh on the cops. But, at the end of the day, I say what the data actually means, not what people want to hear. For me there are always opportunities to dig deeper and find out the truth about a police officer or a police agency. The data is there. And the data is an indicator.

When people ask what the toolset is for identifying a racist cop, I tell them to look at the search data: the social media, complaints, bodycam video usage, etc. All of those components are part of the toolset that is, again, often ignored. The most difficult thing in the courts is that the judiciary looks at this from a legal perspective. Lawyers are not statisticians, they’re not the ones to look at the data, and they’re mostly advocating for a particular side or think they understand the math. But they really don’t. The judges look at the evidence, but if they don’t have a background in mathematics and don’t understand how the data plays out, they’re going to miss the point that is trying to be made.

You often find yourself in an oasis of information where either side is trying to manipulate your stance or exaggerate it and extrapolate it to use in support of their position. Then you have a judge who may insist upon fairness, but only has a certain amount of time and knowledge to perform their duties. You’re an isolated component amid these individuals who are just trying to get to the next case.

TCR: Reform efforts often emphasize new training programs. Why do you feel this can be the wrong direction to take?

ADC: Training is a reminder. You have three types of training in a law enforcement scenario: academy training that forms you as an officer, field experience training where you ride along with a superior officer who shows you what you need to do on the job, and in-service training that police receive once a year, depending on the institution they work for.

For example, the state of Texas may say that every officer in the state has to receive eight hours of implicit bias training within the next 24 months, or a local police department may say that their officers are not writing good reports so they need to do a report writing class. Training is important, not only as a source of information but also as a reminder of what officers should and should not do.

However, coming from a guy who has trained over 15,000 police officers and every chief of police in Texas for the last 22 years, if you hire the wrong person for the job there is no training in the world that is going to change that. I believe in training, but trainers can’t perform miracles. If you bring someone in who is already jaded, who is racist, and who has been brought up as a racist, someone who should never have become a cop, there is nothing I can do in training to change that person’s mindset or heart. As we continue to challenge the profession in years to come, it makes more sense for law enforcement to invest their resources into their ability to hire “trainable people” who don’t show implicit bias to an extent that can’t be addressed and fixed. I talk to significantly large agencies with 2,000 to 3,000 officers, and when I ask them how many recruiters they have, they tell me two or three.

When I ask them what kind of budget they have, they tell me not much. So, they get desperate and they lower their standards. And the less emphasis you place on a recruiting budget and recruiting strategy, the more difficult it is going to be for those trainers, whether in service or at the academy. Law enforcement loves to use the word training. If somebody does something wrong they say it’s a training issue. So, they send you off to do training, because they think somehow they can fix you that way.

In reality, training is not the answer. If you want to correct the problem, you have to go back to the roots of it. That’s why in every incident where excessive force is used, I always say not only is that a failure of training, of supervision, and a failure of the department, but also of the recruiter and the hiring process. That person should have never made it through. Period.

TCR: What is the importance of field training officers (FTOs) and sergeants in how a new officer develops?

ADC: You have a 21-year-old who goes through the academy and goes through 6-8 months of training every day for 40 hours a week. They do marches, runs, study the criminal code, self-defense, report writing, all the things that cops have to go through. Then they are given an assignment to work with a FTO, sometimes they rotate through two or three, and these officers evaluate a new officer’s performance in the field.

The idea is to incorporate your training to real-life scenarios. Are you following those thing that we taught you at the academy? One of the first things that those FTOs say is forget what you learned at the academy, I’m going to show you how to be a real cop. If that person is jaded, has been at the job for too long, doesn’t really want to be there, all of that negative behavior is going to rub off on an impressionable officer.

By the time they finish, and go on their own, you often find that whatever they learned from the FTO is what they display in their behavior. The most important rank in law enforcement structure is the sergeant. The sergeant is the hands-on supervisor who is made aware of 90 percent of what is going on with officers on the job. The captains, the deputy chiefs, the commanders, they’re doing their own thing; and, unless there’s a major incident, you’re not going to see them. That sergeant shows up when a supervisor is needed, they sign the immediate evaluations of officers, recommending them for commendations, or writing them up [for infractions]. Sometimes, those sergeants suffer from a desire of being liked by their officers and instead of being supervisors they become good buddies. When that happens, and sergeants forget their role, you begin to see that dysfunctionality, and officers begin to get away with stuff that they shouldn’t because the sergeant engages in what the Department of Justice calls deliberate indifference. They look the other way and let it happen.

TCR: Consent decrees are often used to bring broken police departments into line. What are some of the complications to the success of these mandates?

ADC: A consent decree is a last resort. It is not a quick fix or a cure all. I’ve worked in two of them. I served as federal monitor in New Orleans and Puerto Rico. It’s a very difficult process to go through. They happen when the dysfunctionality of a department has reached such levels that there needs to be some federal intervention in order for the Constitution of the United States to be the main point of that department’s police service. Some of them don’t work all the time. Some of the components of the consent decree should be adjusted. Such as how a team of federal monitors is picked.

[Former Attorney General] Jeff Sessions has said the process has become almost like a business where huge law firms are applying to become federal monitors for consent decrees with very little or no experience in policing. Just because you’re a lawyer doesn’t mean you understand how to do that job. Just because you’ve been a cop all of your life doesn’t mean you understand data. The more successful consent decrees have a mixed team of monitors with academics, criminologists, lawyers, and former police chiefs who have all had some experience.

When you have a blended team like that you end up with good results.  How do you know a consent decree is working? The absence of major issues. The absence of a shooting and various scandals that would otherwise happen if the team wasn’t in place. Often, though, you also have consent decrees where the party being sued is still fighting it.

That delays things further and costs millions of dollars. What you want in a consent decree is for a police department to be transformed so that the culture of the department is one where the unusual becomes an exception not the norm.

If somebody goes out on a limb and shoots someone for no reason it becomes a scandal as opposed to something that happens all the time. If that is the norm, you probably are in need of a consent decree because the violation of the constitution has become a standard. Flipping things around requires people to be fired, to be indicted, sometimes both, and sometimes it requires a revamping of an entire department and starting from scratch. There’s no way you’re going to do that unless you have the intervention of the federal government, and specifically the authority of a federal judge, behind you to hold that department in contempt and hold them accountable. The consent decree is only as powerful as the judges authority and their ability to do the job.

TCR: You point out that everything changed after George Floyd. What changes do you see; and is defunding the police part of it?

ADC: George Floyd changed everything because it made the average Caucasian individual in the United States entertain the possibility that police excessive use of force can be a reality. In previous incidences, when you look at the deaths of African Americans at the hands of police officers, I would always hear a caveat or a suggested context from white people to excuse why force, even lethal force, was used.

With George Floyd you see a man who is on the ground, who is gasping for air, crying out for his mother, and also saying I can’t breathe. You see all these cops around him, some with their knees on his back and head, not paying attention to what he is saying on video and nine minutes later he dies. There is no caveat. There is no excuse. This individual died at the hands of a police officer because he was accused of having a forged bill. That’s inexcusable in this country.

So, for a white individual who didn’t believe that racism is in place, didn’t believe that these things happen, the unbelievable became believable. They were introduced to the concept that this was possible and likely in this country. That’s why it changed everything. However, I don’t like the term defunding the police. The original premise of the defunding of the police was to restructure the funding and orient cops towards community policing and towards things that will save lives and improve community relations.

But if the premise or intention was ever meant to take away funding from law enforcement all together and put something else in place I don’t see it. Logically, you don’t remove resources from those individuals who need it. If you’re saying you’re going to redo the equation and reuse the resources, let’s talk about that. I’ve been in discussions nationally where people who brought that term into the equation have said they regret it because it was taken to a place that wasn’t their intention.

If it’s about reimagining law enforcement in the context of how the funding is being utilized, what the need is right now, and how we can make it a better field, those are the real questions that should be asked. Sadly, that has been lost in political debate.

Isidoro Rodriguez is a contributor to TCR.

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17 Racial Profiling

Robin S. Engel, School of Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati

Derek Cohen is a Doctoral Student at the University of Cincinnati.

• Published: 01 April 2014
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The use of the term “racial profiling” gained popularity in the mid-1990s and originally referred to the reliance on race as an explicit criterion in “profiles” of offenders that some police organizations issued to guide police officer decision making. This essay traces the evolution of racial profiling, both in terms of terminology and police practice, from the “War on Drugs” in the 1980s to present day. The essay highlights changes in policies, legislation, litigation, and data collection across the country as mechanisms to control the use of racial profiling, particularly in terms of stops and stop outcomes (e.g., citations, arrests, searches, and seizures). It also critiques the research methods and statistical analyses often used by researchers who conduct studies of the prevalence, causes, and consequences of racially biased policing. The essay concludes by issuing a new call to action for future research in the area of racial profiling. Rather than seeking incremental improvements in data collection and methodology, this essay argues for a fundamental reconceptualization of research on race and policing.

T he history of race and policing in the United States is long and troubled. For centuries, the police in America were used as instruments of the state to enforce discriminatory laws and uphold the status quo of the time ( Richardson 1974 ; Monkonen 1981). The discriminatory treatment by police of minorities—and blacks in particular—was reflective of a socially unjust and biased society ( Kerner Commission 1968 ). While the systematic targeting and biased treatment endured by minorities at the hands of American police has been well documented ( Williams and Murphy 1990 ), significant progress has been made in the last several decades toward equity and legitimacy in American policing ( Walker 2003 ; Warren and Tomaskovic-Devey 2009 ; Bayley and Nixon 2010 ). Nevertheless, the legacy that this troubled past brings to modern policing bears repeating. A current concern in American society remains the use of race or ethnicity by police as reason for some form of coercive action. This police practice—often referred to as racial profiling—is widely recognized by politicians, the public, and even the police themselves as inherently problematic. Yet reducing this problem to a single term—racial profiling—simultaneously reduces the nuances surrounding the multifaceted and complicated issues regarding police, race, and crime in America.

In this essay, we first begin with a brief historical overview of the ground previously traveled as it relates to policing, race, and research. In our discussion, we note the historical application of racially-biased police practices as a result of policies arising from the “War on Drugs” in the 1980s. Thereafter we describe the use and definition of the term “racial profiling” and trace the resulting changes in policies, legislation, litigation, and data collection across the country. The changes in data collection in particular resulted in the development of a body of research designed specifically to determine racial/ethnic disparities in police treatment during pedestrian and traffic stops. We summarize this body of research, including a focus on stops and stop outcomes (e.g., citations, arrests, searches, and seizures), and offer a critique of the research methods and statistical analyses often used by researchers. Finally, we issue a new call to action for future research in the area of racial profiling. Rather than seeking incremental improvements in data collection and methodology, we argue for a fundamental reconceptualization of research on race and policing. While we note that this essay is predominately focused on the experiences and research surrounding one racial group (blacks) within one country (United States), it is widely applicable to other minority groups within the United States, as well as minority groups within other countries. Indeed, it seems that the core components of the American story of racial bias, policing, and research is widely generalizable across cultures.

This essay represents a broad examination of racial profiling in the United States, both from historical and contemporary perspectives. Section 17.1 of the essay describes the history of racial profiling, as it was originally developed as a tactic to detect and apprehend drug couriers along the I-95 corridor of the Eastern Seaboard. Section 17.1 also describes the initial efforts to collect data on racial profiling, as well as identifying the evolving definition of the term. Section 17.2 reviews the literature on racially-biased policing starting with the classic ethnographic work that first identified issues related to race and policing; it then examines the more recent empirical evidence on the extent to which racial and ethnic disparities have appeared evident during vehicle and pedestrian stops, citation outcomes, and searches and seizure. Section 17.3 offers a new collective research agenda to help us begin to determine if the observed racial disparities in stops, citations, and searches and seizures amounts to racial/ethnic bias and discrimination. That section also draws some conclusions as to the state of the science on racially-biased policing.

A number of conclusions can be drawn:

Despite large-scale data collection efforts, the extent of racially-biased policing in the United States remains largely unknown

Despite calls from researchers to reform institutional practices, increase accountability and supervision, and engage in better data collection, the evidence regarding the actual impact of such recommendations on racially-biased policing is nearly non-existent.

While many agencies can readily identify racial/ethnic disparities, they often cannot detect bias, and further cannot determine why these disparities exist or how to effectively reduce them.

As police agencies continue to promote and advance practices that have demonstrated effectiveness (e.g., hot spots and other types of focused policing strategies), it is likely that racial/ethnic disparities in stops and stop outcomes will continue or perhaps even increase based on differential offending patterns and saturation patrols in predominately minority areas.

More, and better, research is necessary if we are serious about both the role of science in policing and the need to reduce racial/ethnic bias in policing.

17.1 History of Racial Profiling

While the troubled history of race and policing in the United States is lengthy and complex, a more recent focus on racial profiling emerged in the last two decades. The use of the term “racial profiling” gained popularity in the mid-1990s and originally referred to the use of race as an explicit criterion in “profiles” of offenders that some police organizations issued to guide police officer decision-making ( Engel, Calnon, and Bernard 2001 ; Harris 2006 ). These profiles were used as part of a larger strategy for the “War on Drugs” from the 1980s and 1990s that led to dramatic changes in criminal justice strategies nationally, including the aggressive targeting of drug offenders at the street level and increased rates of incarceration and sentence length ( Scalia 2001 ; Harris 2006 ; Tonry 2011 ). Racial profiling specifically referred to criminal interdiction practices based on drug-courier profiles that were identified and provided to law enforcement officers through federal, state, and local law enforcement training. As part of police efforts to interdict drug trafficking on the nation’s highways, police agencies developed guidelines or “profiles” to help officers identify characteristics of drug couriers that could be used to target drivers and vehicles. This training sometimes identified subjects’ race and ethnicity as part of a larger “profile” of drug courier activity. The focus of this training was on Interstate highways on the East Coast, particularly around the I-95 corridor that linked Miami, Florida with cities and drug distribution points in the major mid-Atlantic and Northeastern cities ( Harris 1999 ; Engel, Calnon, and Bernard 2002 ). Based on this profile, police would make pretextual stops ( Whren v. U.S. , 517 U.S. 806 [1996]) and attempt to establish a legal basis to search for contraband.

Another police tactic resulting from the “War on Drugs” was the increased use of pedestrian stops, along with stop and frisk tactics ( Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 [1968]) to maximize the number of police-citizen encounters with individuals believed to be involved in criminal behavior. These targeted enforcement strategies were especially felt by young minority males, who were disproportionately subject to police surveillance and imprisonment for drug offenses ( Kennedy 1997 ; Walker 2001 ; Harris 2002 ; Tonry 2011 ). The controversy surrounding the aggressive use of traffic and pedestrian stops by police still exists today ( Fagan 2004 ; Gelman, Fagan, and Kiss 2007 ; Ridgeway and MacDonald 2009 ).

17.1.1 The Rise of Data Collection

High-profile litigation efforts in the states of New Jersey ( New Jersey v. Soto , 734 A.2d 350 [1996]) and Maryland ( Wilkins v. Maryland State Police , MJG 93-468 [1993]) alleging racial profiling by law enforcement agencies brought a discussion of these practices to the forefront of American public debate ( GAO 2000 ; Buerger and Farrell 2002 ; Harris 2002 ). Based on the notoriety and successful litigation involving these claims of racial profiling, the public, media, and politicians began to exert pressure on law enforcement to address perceived racial/ethnic bias, particularly as related to traffic stops ( Walker 2001 ; Barlow and Barlow 2002 ; Novak 2004 ). As a result of this pressure, law enforcement agencies and politicians across the country began erecting policies and legislation designed to “eliminate” racial profiling practices by local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies ( Harris 2002 , 2006 ; Tillyer, Engel, and Wooldredge 2008 ). These policies were often focused on traffic stops and included mandates to collect data regarding driver and passenger demographics from every traffic stop (regardless of disposition). The data collection efforts originally designed to uncover racial/ethnic disparities in vehicle stops were initiated by litigation, legislative mandate, and proactive action by law enforcement agencies to address community concerns ( Ramirez, McDevitt, and Farrell 2000 ; Davis 2001 ; Davis, Gillis, and Foster 2001 ; Tillyer, Engel, and Cherkauskas 2010 ). As noted by Tillyer et al. (2010) , by 2009, thirty-nine states had passed some form of legislation regarding racial profiling. Specifically, eleven states enacted legislation that prohibited racial profiling, five states mandated traffic-stop data collection, and twelve states both prohibited racial profiling and mandated data collection, while eight states had bills under consideration and three states had other forms of racial profiling policies.

The heavy focus on data collection during traffic stops was based in part on the original definition of racial profiling, but also because of the recognition that traffic stops are the most frequently occurring type of police-citizen interaction and can be initiated for a wide variety of reasons including legal violations, departmental policy requirements, and officer discretion ( Skolnick 1966 ; Walker 2001 ; Meehan and Ponder 2002 ; Alpert, MacDonald, and Dunham 2005 ). Analyses of the Police Public Contact Survey demonstrate that of the 19 percent of citizens surveyed who reported having some form of contact with police, the majority of these citizens (56 percent) indicated that contact occurred as the result of a traffic stop ( Durose, Schmitt, and Langan 2007 ). In addition, police officers have wide and often unfettered discretion when determining when to initiate traffic stops and the outcomes that motorists receive as a result of those stops ( Wilson 1968 ; Ramirez, McDevitt, and Farrell 2000 ; Lundman and Kaufmann 2003 ; Engel and Calnon 2004b ; Novak 2004 ; Engel 2005 ).

When initial claims of racial profiling during traffic stops were leveled against police, it was clear that law enforcement agencies across the country were poorly prepared to demonstrate, document, or defend their current practices. Quite simply, most law enforcement agencies did not routinely collect information about all motorists who were stopped by police, nor did they collect basic demographic information about those who were stopped (including race/ethnicity) ( Ramirez, McDevitt, and Farrell 2000 ). While many agencies did routinely collect information about citations and arrests, this information could not be compared to the population of all motorists stopped by police that did not result in further official action. Likewise, the population of drivers “eligible” to be stopped for traffic violations was also unknown. Described as the “benchmark” problem, the need to compare traffic stops to those eligible to be stopped created a new stream of research across the country ( Walker 2001 ; Engel and Calnon 2004b ). Unfortunately, as noted in more detail below, over two decades of subsequent research produced very little, as the benchmark problem has never been adequately addressed by the research community.

17.1.2 Defining Racial Profiling

The initial narrow focus on “racial profiling” did not adequately address a much larger issue in American police-community relations. Specifically, claims of inappropriate police targeting of minorities for purposes of enhanced criminal apprehension and punishment have been recognized throughout American history. While the term “racial profiling” referred directly to the specific policies and practices in the 1990s of targeting minorities traveling on interstates for increased scrutiny to obtain drug seizures, concerns of racial bias and illegitimate practices by police have existed for many decades. Therefore, researchers recognized the need to broaden the conversation by calling for examinations of all forms of police bias. A more comprehensive definition allowed policy makers, practitioners, and academics to better focus on issues of racial bias beyond drug profiles during traffic stops.

As noted by Fridell and Scott (2005) the term racial profiling has evolved over time. Despite the rather narrow definition of profiling that began with policing drug trafficking, the growing public consensus became that any and all decisions made by officers based solely or partially on the race of the suspect were considered racial profiling. It was this change from a narrowly defined term of profiling to an all-encompassing term that led Fridell et al. (2001) to first introduce the new term. They argued that some past definitions of profiling may have been too restrictive, focusing exclusively on “sole” reliance on race. They noted that police decision making is rarely based on any sole factor, including race. Furthermore, in focus groups with citizens and police officers, Fridell et al. (2001) noted that citizens defined profiling as encompassing any and all demonstrations of racial bias in policing and viewed it as widespread. On the other hand, for police officers “profiling” connoted only the narrow definition of sole reliance on race; therefore, they viewed it as a much rarer occurrence. The differing definitions of profiling led to defensiveness and frustration as the two groups talked past each other, thus the development of the new term, racially biased policing, which Fridell and her colleagues defined as follows: “Racially biased policing occurs when law enforcement inappropriately considers race or ethnicity in deciding with whom and how to intervene in an enforcement capacity.”

As noted by Engel (2008) , economists and other academics have identified two different types of police racial/ethnic bias: 1) “taste discrimination” or “disparate treatment” and 2) “statistical discrimination” or “disparate impact” ( Becker 1957 ; Arrow 1973 ). The difference between these two concepts is based on the individual intentions of police officers—in the former, racial/ethnic discrimination is the direct result of intentional police bias, while in the later, racial/ethnic discrimination is the result of factors other than individual police bias (i.e., deployment patterns, differences based on deployment patterns, offending behavior, etc.) ( Knowles, Perisco, and Todd 2001 ; Ayres 2002 , 2005 ; Persico and Castleman 2005 ). Accurately measuring and classifying these two general types of police bias, however, have proved difficult for researchers. A summary of the evidence regarding racially biased policing is reviewed below.

17.2 The Evidence

Initial systematic research of the police began in the 1950s when a few ethnographic studies reported the realities of policing and the use of discretion. These studies described police agencies and culture (e.g., Wilson 1968 ; Van Maanen 1974 ; Reiss 1983 ; Manning 1997 ); police-citizen encounters (e.g., Skolnick 1966 ; Reiss 1971 ; Muir 1977 ); and the use of coercive power during interactions, particularly with minorities (e.g., Westley 1953 , 1970 ; Skolnick 1966 ; Bayley and Mendelsohn 1969 ; Bittner 1970 ). From this beginning, a body of research emerged that exposed issues surrounding racial bias, abuse of force, corruption, and poor police-community relations ( Bernard and Engel 2001 ). Much of this work was informed by an implicit assumptions that police decision making was inherently biased and exposure of these practices was necessary for reform. Given the tenor of the times, these assumptions are hardly surprising. More importantly, these assumptions created a lasting legacy that is seldom directly challenged in current studies of police decision making.

Over time, a more quantitative body of research developed that examined coercive outcomes of police-citizen encounters (i.e., citations, arrests, use of force) and whether citizens’ characteristics influenced these outcomes. This research evolved from simple bivariate comparisons of police decisions and citizen characteristics (e.g., Pivilian and Briar 1964 ; Black and Reiss 1970 ; Black 1971 ), to the use of multivariate statistical techniques designed to explore the effects of extra-legal factors on police decision making, after controlling for legal factors (e.g., Smith and Visher 1981 ; Smith, Visher, and Davidson 1984 ; Worden 1989 ; Klinger 1994 ; Mastrofski et al. 2000 ). The body of research that emerged compared the impact of legal to extra-legal factors, including the effect of race on police decision making ( Sherman 1980 ; Riksheim and Chermak 1993 ; National Research Council 2004 ).

Although researchers made significant methodological and statistical advances from the 1970s through the 1990s, the actual research questions being asked remained relatively constant. With only a handful of exceptions, this work focused on police decisions to use specific coercive sanctions, including citations, arrests, and use of force. The focus of this research was to determine whether police used their considerable discretion in a morally defensible manner. Summary reviews of this body of research generally indicate that despite differences in measures and methods, a majority of the studies demonstrate legal factors have the largest impact over police behavior ( Gottfredson and Gottfredson 1988 ; Riksheim and Chermak 1993 ; Klinger 1994 ; National Research Council 2004 ). Research has also demonstrated that to a lesser extent, some extra-legal factors impact officer decision making even when legal factors are controlled for; in particular, citizen demographics (including race/ethnicity) have been identified as correlated with some coercive outcomes ( Riksheim and Chermak 1993 ; National Research Council 2004 ).

Based on this larger literature examining police behavior, a growing area of more narrowly focused research has emerged in the last two decades to inform our understanding of “racial profiling” during traffic stops in particular. This research considers stop and search practices (e.g., Fagan and Davies 2000 ; Gould and Mastrofski 2004 ; Alpert, MacDonald, and Dunham 2005 ; Warren and Tomaskovic-Devey 2009 ), and more nuanced decision making points, including the development and interpretation of cues of suspicion ( Alpert, MacDonald, and Dunham 2005 ), and decisions to patrol certain areas ( Tomaskovic-Devey, Mason, and Zingraff 2004 ).

Traffic stop research generally examines two types of police decision making situations: 1) the decision to initiate a traffic stop, and 2) the resolution/disposition of that traffic stop ( Ramirez, McDevitt, and Farrell 2000 ; Smith and Alpert 2002 ). However, given the inherent methodological limitations of examining racial disparities in stop decisions, recent research has focused nearly exclusively on identifying and explaining racial/ethnic disparities in traffic stop outcomes ( Tillyer, Engel, and Wooldredge 2008 ; Tillyer and Engel 2012 ). The findings and limitations of research on stops and post-stop outcomes are reviewed in greater detail below.

17.2.1 Traffic and Pedestrian Stops

Initial research examining racial profiling relied on the use of traffic stop studies to determine racial/ethnic disparities in officers’ decisions to stop motorists. These initial studies reported differences in aggregate rates of stops across racial groups and often interpreted these disparities as evidence of racial discrimination (e.g., Lamberth 1994 , 1997 ). After these initial studies, dozens of published studies and agency reports followed that reported the degree to which police agencies over-stop minority drivers, relative to white drivers ( Fridell 2004 ; Tillyer, Engel, and Wooldredge 2008 ). Over time, however, researchers were more careful to note that while these studies demonstrated racial/ethnic disparities in traffic stops, it could not be determined if these disparities actually represented racial bias by police. Researchers lacked the ability to determine why disparities existed. Rather, researchers focused on establishing a standard basis for determining that particular demographic groups were overrepresented in police stops, by comparing the percentage of drivers of a particular racial/ethnic group to the percentage that are expected to be stopped assuming no bias (i.e., a benchmark) ( Zingraff et al. 2000 ; Engel, Calnon, and Bernard 2002 ; McMahon et al. 2002 ; Smith and Alpert 2002 ; Fridell 2004 ; Rojek, Rosenfeld, and Decker 2004 ; Schafer, Carter, and Katz-Bannister 2004 ; Gaines 2006 ; Tillyer, Engel, and Wooldredge 2008 ).

Benchmark comparisons represent researchers’ attempts to isolate race as an explanatory factor for disparity in traffic stops from the driving quality explanation and other possible alternative factors, including driving quantity, driving location, time of travel, etc. ( Engel, Calnon, and Bernard 2002 ). However, this approach has considerable limitations, the most important of which is the inability to identify and measure a scientifically valid benchmark for comparison purpose ( Walker 2001 ; Engel and Calnon 2004a ; Fridell 2004 ; Tillyer, Engel, and Wooldredge 2008 ; Ridgeway and MacDonald 2009 ). In this effort to rule out factors other than racial discrimination in traffic stop research, social scientists utilized several different data sources to measure comparison groups, some of which were readily available and others that involved initiating new data collection. The most common types of benchmark data include: Residential Census populations, “adjusted” Census populations, official accident data, DMV records of licensed drivers, citizen surveys, internal departmental comparisons, observations of roadway usage, and assessments of traffic violating behavior (for review, see Fridell et al. 2001 ; Walker 2001 ; Engel and Calnon 2004a ; Fridell 2004 ). Each type of data has strengths and limitations as a representative measure of motorists at risk of being stopped by police. Importantly, no benchmark data has demonstrated the ability to adequately measure all the risk factors associated with the likelihood of being stopped and no consensus exists regarding which benchmarks are the most accurate ( Engel and Calnon 2004b ).

Early studies into disparate stop practices often used census data and other official records as the relevant denominator. For example, Verniero and Zoubek (1999) sought to uncover racial bias in the state of New Jersey by comparing the percentage of minority motorists stopped compared to their percentage in the residential population or eligible driving population. Similar analyses were conducted using data from Cincinnati, Ohio ( Browning et al. 1994 ). Both studies reported that minority drivers constituted a greater proportion of stops compared to their representation in the residential population. Later studies marginally improved on this method by using the driving-eligible portion of the population. For example, in an analysis of traffic stops in Richmond, Virginia, Smith and Petrocelli (2001) found that when compared to the driving-eligible population minority motorists were overrepresented in the stop data, concluding that minority motorists were 46 percent more likely to be stopped than nonminority motorists. This finding was echoed by Meehan and Ponder (2002) ; using the alternative measure of observed roadway composition in a mostly-white suburban community, the authors found that the minority drivers were three times more likely to be stopped by the police. Disparities between driving population and stoppage rates were also observed when using spatially-weighted benchmark to account for confounding issues presented by cross-jurisdictional commuters ( Rojek, Rosenfeld, and Decker 2004 ). In an analysis of the greater St. Louis, Missouri area, the authors found concentrated areas of small instances of disparate stop practices, with blacks being more likely to be stopped, searched, and arrested than white and Hispanic motorists in the areas in which a relationship was found.

Disparity via a disproportionate share of stops has been observed in studies of the San Jose and Sacramento Police Departments’ traffic practices as well. During the period of study from July to September 1999, Hispanics represented 43 percent of motorists stopped by police while accounting for just 31 percent of San Jose’s population ( Withrow 2004 ). Similarly, using Census data as a benchmark Greenwald (2001) it was shown that during a one-year period black motorists were stopped by the Sacramento police at greater frequency than justified by their percentage in the general population.

Census data, however, are limited in their ability to measure alternative explanations of racial disparities including factors influencing drivers’ risk of being stopped (e.g., where and when they drive, frequency of driving, what and how they drive) ( Engel and Calnon 2004a ; Gaines 2006 ). The Census’ lack of measures of alternative explanatory factors, however, did not prevent some of the initial studies of traffic stops from prematurely interpreting disparity as discrimination and attributing racial disparities in stops and/or stop outcomes to unmeasured officers’ racial prejudice ( Engel, Calnon, and Bernard 2002 ). Most researchers in the field began to realize, however, that the hypothesis that police are racially biased in their stopping decisions is just one of numerous possible hypotheses or explanations for disparity in stops. Without measuring alternative explanatory factors, researchers cannot determine whether differences in traffic stops and stop outcomes reflect disparity or discrimination ( Engel, Calnon, and Bernard 2002 ).

One suggested reason for these reported racial disparities among stopped motorists is the use of traffic stops as a pretext for criminal or drug interdiction purposes. Some support has been found for this hypothesis in studies of suburban communities ( Meehan and Ponder 2002 ; Novak 2004 ), highlighting that while the correlation of race and the decision to stop is weak, minorities are more likely to be stopped at night and to reside in areas outside where the stop has taken place. This has given rise to a conflict theory-oriented explanation of police behavior (i.e., that police officers disproportionately target minorities when found outside of the areas where they typically reside or travel). Likewise, Petrocelli, Piquero, and Smith (2003) demonstrated that contextual variables, such as a neighborhood’s percentage of black and UCR Part I crime rate, influence the number of stops performed in the area. Subsequently, searches of black suspects in these high-search areas resulted in fewer arrests or summons being issued. This general trend has been shown in self-reported data sources as well. A telephone survey of licensed drivers in North Carolina illustrated differential practices between the local police departments and the North Carolina State Highway Patrol (NCSHP). The decision of local police officers to issue tickets is related to driver age, race, and traffic history, while NCSHP ticketing decisions were driven both by legal factors (i.e., speeding) as well as quasi-legal factors (i.e., driver age and homeownership status) ( Warren et al. 2006 ; Miller 2008 ). Similar (though insignificant) disparities were found by Gaines (2006) in Riverside, California. Reviewing all traffic stops made in 2003, the author established that stops made by traffic units showed no evidence of racial bias, while stops made by patrol and investigative units exhibited slight, statistically insignificant bias. Further, Gaines found that that the stop data correlated strongly with race variables found in neighborhood crime data and received police reports.

Similar findings have been observed in studies of pedestrian stops as well. Using internal benchmarking (i.e., comparing the decisions of one officer to others similarly assigned; Walker 2001 ), Ridgeway and MacDonald (2009) developed a statistical method for identifying potentially problematic officers. These officers were more likely to stop black and Hispanic pedestrians, net of situational characteristics, compared to officers in similar assignments. Of the 2,756 officers whose approximately 500,000 cumulative stops were analyzed, the authors identified only 15 officers (0.54 percent) as significantly more likely to stop minority pedestrians. A multilevel analysis of pedestrian stops in New York City revealed similar patterns. Fagan (2004) found that after controlling arrest rates by race, black and Hispanic pedestrians were stopped more often than white pedestrians. This may be attributable to zero-tolerance policing strategies, the application of which was found to be driven more by neighborhood characteristics including poverty rate, racial makeup, and social disorganization ( Fagan and Davies 2000 ).

Rojek, Rosenfeld, and Decker (2004) sought to correct the problems using Census data as a benchmark by spatially weighting motorists by their residential proximity to the various municipalities under analysis. This was believed to account for the fact that motorists spend more time driving in and around their own neighborhoods, and that race effects could be seen as spurious if observed in a majority-white neighborhood where a disproportionate number of minorities are stopped should that neighborhood abut majority-nonwhite neighborhoods.

Researchers have also developed benchmarks through the use of self-reported citizen surveys. General and purposive surveys have been used in both creating a more accurate composite of individuals’ driving practices as well as recording the nuances of their interaction with the police (e.g., Lundman and Kaufman 2003 ; Miller 2008 ). Citizen surveys offer researchers the benefit of circumnavigating official data collection protocols and observational reports that may fail to capture key variables (such as perceived cause for the stop or officer demeanor) or erroneously categorize the demographic information of the stopped motorist. However, survey response data is prone to errors in recollection, desirability bias, and false reporting ( Engel and Calnon 2004a ).

A shared problem of these various benchmarks, however, is that they do not account for possible racial variations in driving behavior. For example, the differential offending hypothesis holds that certain racial groups may drive more frequently, more aggressively, or in locations with more police presence, and are therefore more likely to attract the attention of law enforcement. The literature offers measured support for this hypothesis; several studies have shown that certain minority subgroups are likely to engage in aggressive driving behaviors at a higher rate and to greater severity than white drivers ( Lange, Blackman, and Johnson 2001 ; Lange, Johnson, and Voas 2005 ; Tillyer and Engel 2012 ).

In summary, the available analyses of traffic stop data have rather consistently demonstrated racial disparities in stopping patterns ( Engel and Johnson 2006 ; Warren et al. 2006 ; Tillyer, Engel, and Wooldredge 2008 ). However, the methodological and analytical problems associated with this body of research are now widely recognized, including the inherent limitations associated with using benchmarks to determine racial disparities in vehicle stops ( Walker 2001 ; Engel, Calnon, and Bernard 2002 ; Engel and Calnon 2004a ; Fridell 2004 ; Tillyer, Engel, and Wooldredge 2008 ; Ridgeway and MacDonald 2009 ). As a result, research emphasis shifted away from examining officers’ initial decisions to stop motorists and more toward officers’ decisions during the stop (e.g., issuing citations, making arrests, and conducting searches). The study of traffic stop outcomes allowed for the use of more robust analytical techniques including multivariate analysis ( Tillyer, Engel, and Wooldredge 2008 ).

17.2.2 Traffic and Pedestrian Stop Outcomes

Many researchers examining racial bias by police have reinvigorated the study of post-stop outcomes, including citations, arrests, and searches. This shift in focus may be due in part to the inherent methodological and statistical problems associated with examining racial disparities in traffic and pedestrian stops. Additionally, some have argued that racial/ethnic bias may be more likely to manifest itself after an initial stop is made and officers interact with citizens ( Ramirez, McDevitt, and Farrell 2000 ; Alpert et al. 2006 ). As noted previously, research examining arrests dominated the policing literature in the 1970s and 1980s. Academics interested in examining racial profiling simply applied the widely used statistical techniques of multivariate regression modeling used in previous examinations of systematic social observation data to current studies using traffic and pedestrian stop data.

17.2.2.1 Citations and Arrests

Rather than focusing on stop or search decisions, the earliest exploration of racially-biased police practices examined the effect of race in the issuance of formal sanctions, such as citations and arrests. The evidence generated regarding the impact of drivers’ race over the likelihood of citations has been mixed. While most studies have reported that drivers’ race has a significant impact over citations, the direction of these reported findings have been both positive and negative ( Tillyer and Engel 2012 ). While some studies have demonstrated that minority drivers were more likely to be cited compared to whites ( Smith et al. 2003 ; Engel, Cherkauskas, and Tillyer 2007 ; Ingram 2007 ), other research suggests that black drivers were less likely to be cited ( Alpert Group 2004 ; Engel et al. 2007 ; Lovrich, et al. 2007 ; Tillyer and Engel 2012 ). These results also varied across racial groups. For example, Alpert et al. (2006) reported that Hispanics, Asian, and Native American drivers were more likely to be cited, while black drivers were less likely to be cited, compared to whites. As a result, there appears to be little consistency regarding the reported influence of race/ethnicity over the likelihood of being issued citations during traffic stops. As concerned in the context of possible police bias, this mixed evidence correlates with differing hypotheses regarding the likely direction of the effect ( Tillyer and Engel 2012 ). Some have suggested that minorities are more likely to be cited once stopped as a form of enhanced punishment. Others have suggested that minorities may be more likely than whites to be stopped as a pretext for criminal interdiction purposes, and then are released with a warning.

Studies examining the impact of race on arrests during traffic and pedestrian stops have been slightly more consistent. Tillyer and Engel (2012) reported that most traffic stop studies found that minority drivers were between 1.5 and 2.6 times more likely to be arrested compared to similarly situated white drivers ( Smith and Petrocelli 2001 ; Withrow 2004 ; Alpert et al., 2006 ). A few studies, however, have reported no racial disparities in arrest (e.g., Alpert Group 2004 ; Engel et al. 2006 ; Tillyer and Engel 2012 ). Other studies suggest that arrest decisions are impacted by both citizen and officer race. For example, Brown and Frank’s (2006) analysis of police-citizen encounters in Cincinnati, Ohio found that after controlling for characteristics of the officer and citizen along with contextual effects, black officers were more likely to arrest black citizens, while white officers are equally likely to arrest both black and white citizens.

In sum, the body of science surrounding racially-biased policing is generally seen as inconclusive ( National Research Council 2004 ). Most recently however, in a meta-analysis of 40 arrest studies using 23 different datasets, Kochel, Wilson, and Mastrofski (2011) systematically computed an effect size for the effect of race in arrest decisions net of offense severity, demeanor, intoxication, and other factors. The researchers reported “with confidence that the results are not mixed. Race matters.” This declaration was based on observed effect sizes ranging from 1.32 to 1.52 (498). The study concluded that blacks were 30 percent more likely be arrested compared to whites, even after controlling for other factors. The authors noted that although previous policing experts have described the collective research findings as “mixed” regarding the effects of race (e.g., Riksheim and Chermak 1993 ; National Research Council 2004 ; Rosich 2007 ), their comprehensive review of the available research, however, is necessarily limited by the quality of the individual studies reviewed. Due to the nature of meta-analysis as a technique, the quality of the meta-analytic results is based on the quality of the individual studies included in the meta-analysis ( Gendreau and Smith 2007 ). Further, their analyses cannot systematically explain why, how, and when race matters in arrest decisions, only that it does.

Specific to traffic and pedestrian stops, the research available generally shows an inconsistent impact of race over the likelihood of issued citations. In contrast, the impact of race over the likelihood of arrest during traffic and pedestrian stops appears to be more consistent, demonstrating racial disparities in arrest decisions. Further, the bulk of the available research demonstrates that minorities (and especially blacks) continue to be arrested at much higher rates than their representation in the general population (Engel and Swartz, forthcoming). Whether this disparity is the result of police bias, however, remains a point of contention throughout the research community.

17.2.2.2 Searches and Seizures

Beyond the decision to stop a minority motorist, racial profiling could potentially manifest itself in officers’ decisions to search. While extant Fourth Amendment precedent limits the utility of contraband discovered outside of reasonable or warranted searches, officers may seek consent to search an individual’s person, effects, or automobile. The relationship between race and search likelihood has been observed across a multitude of jurisdictions, using qualitative and quantitative analyses on both official and unofficial data sources. The bulk of scholarship examining traffic searches suggests that minority motorists are more likely to be searched compared with other racial groups ( Rojek, Rosenfeld, and Decker 2004 ; Withrow 2004 ; Engel and Johnson 2006 ; Roh and Robinson 2009 ; cf. Smith and Petrocelli 2001 ; Paoline and Terrill 2005 ; Schafer et al. 2006 ).

Engel and Johnson’s (2006) review of agency reports from twelve different state highway police/patrol agencies demonstrated consistently higher rates of minority searches compared to white drivers stopped for traffic offenses. For example, using data from the Washington State Patrol, Pickerell, Mosher, and Pratt (2009) found that black and Hispanic drivers were more likely to be searched compared to white drivers, regardless of the reason for the search. Close and Mason’s (2007) examination of traffic stop data from the Florida Highway Patrol also showed that black and Hispanic drivers were more likely to be searched compared to white drivers, irrespective of the search type.

Examining interaction effects using college campus data, Moon and Corley (2007) found that black male students were more likely to be searched compared to their white counterparts. Based on results from propensity score matching, Ridgeway (2006) reported that black motorists were twice as likely as whites to be searched based on probable cause in Oakland, California. And most recently, Rojek, Rosenfeld, and Decker (2012) reported that young, black males were more likely to be searched compared to young white males during traffic stops in St. Louis, Missouri and Cincinnati, Ohio. Likewise, analyses of survey data from the Police Public Contact Survey indicated that younger drivers, male drivers, and minority drivers all reported higher rates of search compared with other drivers ( Engel and Calnon 2004a ). Similar racial disparities in search rates have been reported in survey and qualitative research ( Brunson 2007 ; Brunson and Weitzer 2009 ).

Despite these consistent findings, Tillyer, Klahm, and Engel (2012) identified several limitations of the analyses examining racial disparities in search rates. First, many studies did not separate mandatory from discretionary searches. Mandatory searches (e.g., searches incident to arrest, inventory searches, etc.) are required by departmental policy and should not be included in analyses designed to examine officer discretion. Second, as with other post-stop analyses, the statistical analyses of searches often are misspecified due to the omitted variable problem (cf. Mustard 2003 ; Gelman, Fagan, and Kiss 2007 ). Third, examinations of officer search behavior is often based on pooled variance models ( Lundman 2003 ; Alpert, Dunham, and Smith 2007 ; Moon and Corley 2007 ), without taking into account the nested nature of traffic stop data that requires the use of hierarchical models. Finally, as with studies of citations and arrests, research examining searches is often not guided by a theoretical framework necessary to understand the reasons for racial disparities in search rates ( Engel, Calnon, and Bernard 2002 ; Tomaskovic-Devey, Mason, and Zingraff 2004 ; Engel and Johnson 2006 ).

The current discussion regarding racial profiling has also shifted from examinations of stops, benchmarks, and search rates, to examinations of contraband seizures during searches. A “hit rate” commonly refers to the percentage of searches conducted by police that result in discoveries of contraband ( Engel 2008 ). In addition to criminologists and legal scholars, economists have entered the racial profiling debate by publishing articles using police vehicle and pedestrian stop, search and seizure data in an effort to determine racial and ethnic discrimination at the hands of the police. Specifically, economists have argued that a statistical comparison of search success rates can be used to distinguish between statistical discrimination and officer bias ( Knowles, Persico, and Todd 2001 ; Ayres 2002 ; Persico and Castleman 2005 ; Persico and Todd 2006 ). The economic perspective explicitly suggests that if one racial/ethnic group is found to be more involved in criminal activity, members of that racial/ethnic group should be subjected to increased police scrutiny in an effort to maximize police resources and increase the rates of discovering contraband. Therefore, under these economic principles, a difference in search rates across racial/ethnic groups is tolerable if the rates of recovering contraband across racial groups are statistically equivalent ( Knowles, Persico, and Todd 2001 ; Anwar and Fang 2006 ).

To identify racial/ethnic discrimination, the analytical strategy utilized is a statistical comparison of search outcomes across racial/ethnic groups, commonly referred to as the “outcome test” ( Ayres 2002 ). If the hit rates are different across racial/ethnic groups, economists argued this is evidence of discrimination ( Knowles, Persico and Todd 2001 ; Ayres 2002 ; Hernandez-Murillo and Knowles 2004 ; Persico and Castleman 2005 ; Anwar and Fang 2006 ; Persico and Todd 2006 ). Using the outcome test method, most studies have reported that first, minorities are more likely to be searched, and second, when searched, minorities are less likely to be found with contraband compared to whites. However, the use of the outcome test as a tool to determine police discrimination has been met with sharp criticism. As noted by criminologists and economists, many of the underlying assumptions required by the statistical model do not coincide with what is known about decision-making during police-citizen encounters, and further the underlying conditions necessary to support the outcome test cannot be met (Anwar and Fang 2004; Dharmapala and Ross 2004 ; Hernandez-Murillo and Knowles 2004 ; Engel 2008 ; Engel and Tillyer 2008 ; Antonovics and Knight 2009 ).

Nevertheless, the accumulating evidence that minorities are more likely to be searched, but less likely to be discovered with contraband begs the question why ? Why are minority citizens searched more frequently for discretionary reasons, but less frequently found to be carrying contraband? The outcome test assumes the response is officer bias, but there are many other potential contributing factors ( Engel 2008 ). Questioning why racial disparities exist demonstrates the severe limitation of this body of research—a nearly exclusive focus on outcome , rather than process . Studying the process of officer decision making is crucial to fully developing an understanding of the relationship between citizen race/ethnicity and police behavior. Unpacking and understanding the process of officer decision making is the next great challenge in understanding police discretion and is rooted in the existence of officer suspicion (e.g., Alpert Group 2004 ; Alpert, MacDonald, and Dunham 2005 ).

17.3 The Future

As noted above, the empirical body of evidence available has clearly demonstrated the routine existence of racial and ethnic disparities in stops, citations, arrests, and searches in police agencies across the country. What remains in debate, however, is whether these racial/ethnic disparities are indicative of officer bias. Unfortunately, our research methods and statistical analyses thus far cannot determine officers’ motivation and intent, and therefore cannot determine racial bias and discrimination. While researchers can identify patterns and trends of disparities, we cannot readily determine the causes of these disparities. This is, of course, a critical limitation of social scientific research in this area. And, as a result, our current research cannot readily assist police agencies with the difficult task of developing policies and procedures designed to reduce racial disparities.

In the majority of studies examining bias-based policing, academics typically acknowledge these limitations of their research designs and statistical techniques, while simultaneously noting the importance of their work as adding to the accumulating body of research. Academics then often advocate for more of the same types of research to continue this incremental advancement in knowledge. In contrast to these recommendations, we believe a significant departure from the existing line of research in this area is necessary to advance the field. It appears to us that the current research has exhausted its value, particularly to practitioners struggling to reduce racial/ethnic disparities in police outcomes. Incremental increases in knowledge based on analyses of new data from traffic stop studies, or slight changes in the measurement of variables in yet one more multivariate statistical equation used to model stops, citations, arrests, and searches will not address the overarching methodological limitations that plague this line of research. We agree with Piquero (2009, 376) that “there should be a high priority of focused theoretical and research efforts that use multiple methods to generate a careful description and understanding of police-citizen encounters, as well as the myriad of factors that influence both police and citizen decisions.” We further note that repeated application of the statistical technique du jour (e.g., outcome tests, propensity score matching, hierarchical linear modeling, etc.) also will not solve the underlying benchmark problem, nor will it address why racial/ethnic disparities persist despite multiple forms of police intervention. After over two decades of focused research on racial profiling, the research community is no closer to assisting practitioners in the reduction of racial/ethnic disparities than we were in the early 1990s.

While patterns of racial/ethnic disparities have been routinely identified and confirmed, research dedicated to understanding why these patterns exist has been limited. Despite the abundance of academic study devoted to this topic, researchers have limited theories to explain the mounting evidence of racial/ethnic disparities. Although some researchers developed partial theories to explain these disparities post hoc (e.g., Parker et al. 2004 ; Tomaskovic-Devey, Mason, and Zingraff 2004 ; Warren et al. 2006 ; Smith and Alpert 2007 ), these theories have not been adequately tested ( Tillyer and Engel 2012 ). As a result, researchers continue to struggle with determining why disparities exist in coercive outcomes during police-citizen encounters (Engel and Swartz, forthcoming).

Importantly, there is also little evidence available to suggest that the frequency of racial disparities have been reduced as a result of research efforts, or based on changes in police policies, procedures, and training. National estimates of the rates of police-citizen contacts with minorities have remained relatively stable over time ( Langan et al. 2001 ; Durose, Scmitt, and Langan 2005 , 2007 ), suggesting there have not been significant reductions in racial disparities despite years of attention by legislatures, police administrators, academics, and the public. The only other study attempting to examine this issue suffers from severe methodological constraints. Although Warren and Tomaskovic-Devey (2009) reported that racial disparities in hit rates decreased as a result of media attention and changes in legislation in North Carolina, they did not control for any other rival explanations—including changes in specific training, supervisory oversight, departmental policies, among many others—and further were unable to properly establish time ordering to demonstrate cause and effect (Piquero 2009). Therefore, despite this important first step forward taken by Warren and Tomaskovic-Devery (2009) in an attempt to address these issues, the impact of specific attempts to reduce officer bias remains untested.

Further, we believe that even using new statistical techniques in racial profiling research that are promising (e.g., Ridgeway and MacDonald 2010 ) will not result in significant progress until theories of police discretion grounded in the daily work of police officers are developed and applied to this research (Engel and Swartz, forthcoming). As clearly articulated by Piquero (2009, 372),

the science of racial profiling research rests on a weak data and knowledge base, and although there has been some important methodological/statistical progress, we are likely not yet in a position to reach definitively any strong set of conclusions concerning whether racial profiling exists (even if we can arrive at some working definition and operationalization of it) and most certainly which set of policies can diminish and/or eliminate the explicit/sole use of race/ethnicity in police decision making.

Therefore, the challenges that remain for both research and practice are considerable.

17.3.1 A New Research Agenda

It is based on this review of the state of research in bias-based policing that we call for new approaches and changes in our current research agenda. In short, we argue that it is time to advance research that will better aid practitioners interested in reducing racial/ethnic disparities. A similar argument was made fifteen years ago by Sherman (1998) when he advocated for the use of science to help the police find humane crime fighting practices rather than simply look for failures in policing. That Sherman felt compelled to justify the moral soundness of police crime reduction research illustrates how radical this idea was at the time. This also led to the changing of the core research questions that were being asked by prominent researchers in the field and promoted the evidence-based movement in policing ( Weisburd and Neyroud 2011 ). In the same vein, we argue that rather than continually documenting racial/ethnic disparities in police stops and stop outcomes (e.g., citations, arrests, searches), academics should pursue and advance research specifically designed to reduce racial/ethnic disparities in police decision making and then test the results. How do we know, for example, that the changes in police policies, procedures, and training recommended by researchers have any impact on police behavior? Police agencies across the country spent millions of dollars on changes to policies and training designed to eliminate racial profiling—has it had an impact? The research community has been silent on these critical issues. Many academics, private companies, former practitioners, etc. provide training for police agencies to reduce racial profiling; yet are these trainings effective?

The research questions that must be addressed are: (1) why racial disparities persist in the outcomes of police-citizen encounters, and (2) what works to reduce these disparities. To address these questions, we propose the advancement of a research agenda that includes the implementation of stronger research designs, greater use of mixed methods and qualitative research, and increased use of panel-wave and longitudinal data.

First, the selection of strong research designs is critical, though the selection of the appropriate design should be guided by the questions asked rather than simply relying on external standards. The considerable advances in police effectiveness research, compared to racial profiling research, is due in part to the use of strong quasi-experimental designs, and when appropriate, randomized controlled trials. There is no reason these designs cannot be applied to study the impact of policies, procedures, and training on racial bias. The type of research proposed might include pre- or post-tests of the impact of different policies, procedures, and training implemented by police agencies, or even quasi-experimental designs where some officers, units, etc. are provided specialized training and others are not. Changes in officers’ attitudes, levels of racial disparities in stops, post-stop outcome measures, and citizens’ perceptions could all be measured outcomes. This is not to suggest that other research designs have no value. To the contrary, many important topics cannot be examined with randomized controlled trials or even strong quasi-experiments. But to say that there is a place for all systematic methods is not to say that any method can be fruitfully applied to any question, or that all research methods are created equal. Concerns over police discrimination against minorities can be, and must be, translated into falsifiable and therefore testable hypotheses.

Moreover, research has demonstrated that citizens’ experiences during police-citizen encounters significantly influence their attitudes toward law enforcement ( Brandl, Frank, Worden, and Bynum 1994 ; Weitzer and Tuch 2004 , 2005 ; Engel 2005 ). Given that citizens’ contact with police is most likely to occur as the result of a traffic stop ( Durose, Schmitt, and Langan 2007 ), coupled with the impact that these contacts have on the formation of citizen attitudes, perceptions of racial/ethnic disparities within this context could seriously undermine police legitimacy ( Tillyer and Engel 2012 ). Therefore, researchers might also focus on testing the impact of particular focused policing strategies on citizens’ perceptions of racial bias and police legitimacy. Additionally, police research that examines effectiveness (often measured as reductions in crime) might also include measures of changes in disparate outcomes as an indicator of success. In short, we argue that our collective research agenda should be expanded to focus on research that will assist in the reduction of racial/ethnic disparities, and increases in legitimacy and transparency in policing (e.g., Weitzer and Tuch 2004 , 2005 ; Tyler 2006 ) rather than simply continuing to document racial/ethnic disparities in stops and stop outcomes.

Second, prior to the development of testable interventions, studies of police bias will inevitably rely on non-experimental approaches. But to better understand racial bias, we clearly need to better use mixed method and qualitative examinations of police decision making. In this regard, direct observation of the police, their decision making, and their interactions with the public is critical. Some promising research in this area includes rich qualitative work (e.g., Kennedy 1997 ; Brunson and Miller 2006 ; Brunson and Stewart 2006 ; Engel et al. 2007 ) that helps provide context and may stimulate further theoretical development. This work successfully expands the initial research questions asked in the biased-based policing literature to incorporate police legitimacy research.

It should now be clear to the research community that black box evaluations and secondary data analyses without detailed descriptions of the original data collection effort are seldom helpful. It is essential to capture information about the process so that practitioners can implement and researchers can replicate. For example, a recent study showed that police removal of homeless encampments may have lowered crime ( Berk and MacDonald 2010 ), but the results are unlikely to help policy makers because of inadequate descriptions of the intervention, outcomes, setting, and mechanisms ( Eck 2010 ). Further, this study led to uninformed speculations on the nature of the intervention ( White 2010 ), which in turn led police administrators to question “who will police the criminologists” ( Beck, Bratton, and Kelling 2011 ). Though this example comes from the police effectiveness literature, the same sort of problems exist in racial profiling research when secondary data sets are used and the researchers neither directly observed the police nor understand the details of how the data were collected, and consequently cannot sufficiently describe or understand police decision making.

Longitudinal studies, such as those using panel or time-series designs, show promise in addressing many of the methodological shortcomings found in the current body of research. Unfortunately, these types of data are very limited and attempts to compile an applicable dataset would introduce a host of measurement issues, as independent data sources vary widely. One promising research endeavor is the National Institute of Justice’s recently funded National Police Research Platform ( Rosenbaum, Schuck, and Cordner 2011 ). Providing researchers with longitudinal data on police practice will allow analyses to model the effects of changes in training protocol, workforce changes, and officer perception over time ( National Research Council 2004 ).

17.3.2 Conclusion

Fridell and Scott (2005) have suggested that police administrators need to be concerned about three ways that issues of police racial bias might manifest themselves: “Bad apple” officers, well-intentioned officers in need of guidance, and institutional practices or policies that might inadvertently contribute to the problem. Each involves different types of agency responses to identify and correct the problems. Fridell and Scott identified seven areas that police agencies can consider for responses to racially biased policing: (1) institutional practices and priorities; (2) accountability and supervision; (3) recruitment and hiring; (4) education and training; (5) minority community outreach; (6) policies prohibiting racially biased policing; and (7) data collection. Within each of these categories are a set of reasonable recommendations that, on their face, are believed to reduce police bias. Yet the evidence regarding the actual impact of these recommendations is nearly non-existent. A closer look at the available research surrounding these recommendations demonstrates that we are often operating in the dark. For example, only a handful of studies have considered the impact of recruitment, training, and education, on police behavior generally, and even fewer have focused specifically on reducing biased policing (e.g., Worden 1990 ; Sun 2002 ; Engel and Worden 2003 ). The same critique regarding the lack of evidence can be applied to each of the categories noted by Fridell and Scott (2005) .

Fridell and Scott concluded their article by arguing that “law enforcement has never been better situated to address these issues” (2005, 359) and that “the police are more capable than ever of effectively detecting and addressing police racial bias” (2005, 343). However, based on the lack of available evidence to guide practitioners, we are less optimistic at this stage. While many agencies can readily identify racial/ethnic disparities, they often cannot detect bias, and they further cannot determine why these disparities exist or how to effectively reduce them. Further, as police agencies continue to promote and advance practices that have demonstrated effectiveness (e.g., hot spots and other types of focused policing strategies), it is likely that racial/ethnic disparities in stops and stop outcomes will continue or perhaps even increase based on differential offending patterns and saturation patrols in predominately minority areas ( Engel, Smith, and Cullen 2012 ). This is not to suggest that Fridell and Scott’s identified categories to reduce police bias are inaccurate; we agree that these areas are ripe for reform and that changes in these areas have the potential to reduce racial bias in policing. Rather we argue that specific guidance based on social scientific evidence regarding the types of training, practices, recruitment, policies, supervision, education, etc. to reduce police bias currently does not exist. This is where, we believe, our research community should focus if we are serious about both the role of science in policing and the need to reduce racial/ethnic bias in policing.

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Black americans have a clear vision for reducing racism but little hope it will happen, many say key u.s. institutions should be rebuilt to ensure fair treatment.

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to understand the nuances among Black people on issues of racial inequality and social change in the United States. This in-depth survey explores differences among Black Americans in their views on the social status of the Black population in the U.S.; their assessments of racial inequality; their visions for institutional and social change; and their outlook on the chances that these improvements will be made. The analysis is the latest in the Center’s series of in-depth surveys of public opinion among Black Americans (read the first, “ Faith Among Black Americans ” and “ Race Is Central to Identity for Black Americans and Affects How They Connect With Each Other ”).

The online survey of 3,912 Black U.S. adults was conducted Oct. 4-17, 2021. Black U.S. adults include those who are single-race, non-Hispanic Black Americans; multiracial non-Hispanic Black Americans; and adults who indicate they are Black and Hispanic. The survey includes 1,025 Black adults on Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP) and 2,887 Black adults on Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel. Respondents on both panels are recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses.

Recruiting panelists by phone or mail ensures that nearly all U.S. Black adults have a chance of selection. This gives us confidence that any sample can represent the whole population (see our Methods 101 explainer on random sampling). Here are the questions used for the survey of Black adults, along with its responses and methodology .

The terms “Black Americans,” “Black people” and “Black adults” are used interchangeably throughout this report to refer to U.S. adults who self-identify as Black, either alone or in combination with other races or Hispanic identity.

Throughout this report, “Black, non-Hispanic” respondents are those who identify as single-race Black and say they have no Hispanic background. “Black Hispanic” respondents are those who identify as Black and say they have Hispanic background. We use the terms “Black Hispanic” and “Hispanic Black” interchangeably. “Multiracial” respondents are those who indicate two or more racial backgrounds (one of which is Black) and say they are not Hispanic.

Respondents were asked a question about how important being Black was to how they think about themselves. In this report, we use the term “being Black” when referencing responses to this question.

In this report, “immigrant” refers to people who were not U.S. citizens at birth – in other words, those born outside the U.S., Puerto Rico or other U.S. territories to parents who were not U.S. citizens. We use the terms “immigrant,” “born abroad” and “foreign-born” interchangeably.

Throughout this report, “Democrats and Democratic leaners” and just “Democrats” both refer to respondents who identify politically with the Democratic Party or who are independent or some other party but lean toward the Democratic Party. “Republicans and Republican leaners” and just “Republicans” both refer to respondents who identify politically with the Republican Party or are independent or some other party but lean toward the Republican Party.

Respondents were asked a question about their voter registration status. In this report, respondents are considered registered to vote if they self-report being absolutely certain they are registered at their current address. Respondents are considered not registered to vote if they report not being registered or express uncertainty about their registration.

To create the upper-, middle- and lower-income tiers, respondents’ 2020 family incomes were adjusted for differences in purchasing power by geographic region and household size. Respondents were then placed into income tiers: “Middle income” is defined as two-thirds to double the median annual income for the entire survey sample. “Lower income” falls below that range, and “upper income” lies above it. For more information about how the income tiers were created, read the methodology .

More than a year after the murder of George Floyd and the national protests, debate and political promises that ensued, 65% of Black Americans say the increased national attention on racial inequality has not led to changes that improved their lives. 1 And 44% say equality for Black people in the United States is not likely to be achieved, according to newly released findings from an October 2021 survey of Black Americans by Pew Research Center.

This is somewhat of a reversal in views from September 2020, when half of Black adults said the increased national focus on issues of race would lead to major policy changes to address racial inequality in the country and 56% expected changes that would make their lives better.

At the same time, many Black Americans are concerned about racial discrimination and its impact. Roughly eight-in-ten say they have personally experienced discrimination because of their race or ethnicity (79%), and most also say discrimination is the main reason many Black people cannot get ahead (68%).  

Even so, Black Americans have a clear vision for how to achieve change when it comes to racial inequality. This includes support for significant reforms to or complete overhauls of several U.S. institutions to ensure fair treatment, particularly the criminal justice system; political engagement, primarily in the form of voting; support for Black businesses to advance Black communities; and reparations in the forms of educational, business and homeownership assistance. Yet alongside their assessments of inequality and ideas about progress exists pessimism about whether U.S. society and its institutions will change in ways that would reduce racism.

These findings emerge from an extensive Pew Research Center survey of 3,912 Black Americans conducted online Oct. 4-17, 2021. The survey explores how Black Americans assess their position in U.S. society and their ideas about social change. Overall, Black Americans are clear on what they think the problems are facing the country and how to remedy them. However, they are skeptical that meaningful changes will take place in their lifetime.

Black Americans see racism in our laws as a big problem and discrimination as a roadblock to progress

Black adults were asked in the survey to assess the current nature of racism in the United States and whether structural or individual sources of this racism are a bigger problem for Black people. About half of Black adults (52%) say racism in our laws is a bigger problem than racism by individual people, while four-in-ten (43%) say acts of racism committed by individual people is the bigger problem. Only 3% of Black adults say that Black people do not experience discrimination in the U.S. today.

In assessing the magnitude of problems that they face, the majority of Black Americans say racism (63%), police brutality (60%) and economic inequality (54%) are extremely or very big problems for Black people living in the U.S. Slightly smaller shares say the same about the affordability of health care (47%), limitations on voting (46%), and the quality of K-12 schools (40%).

Aside from their critiques of U.S. institutions, Black adults also feel the impact of racial inequality personally. Most Black adults say they occasionally or frequently experience unfair treatment because of their race or ethnicity (79%), and two-thirds (68%) cite racial discrimination as the main reason many Black people cannot get ahead today.

Black Americans’ views on reducing racial inequality

Black Americans are clear on the challenges they face because of racism. They are also clear on the solutions. These range from overhauls of policing practices and the criminal justice system to civic engagement and reparations to descendants of people enslaved in the United States.

Changing U.S. institutions such as policing, courts and prison systems

About nine-in-ten Black adults say multiple aspects of the criminal justice system need some kind of change (minor, major or a complete overhaul) to ensure fair treatment, with nearly all saying so about policing (95%), the courts and judicial process (95%), and the prison system (94%).

Roughly half of Black adults say policing (49%), the courts and judicial process (48%), and the prison system (54%) need to be completely rebuilt for Black people to be treated fairly. Smaller shares say the same about the political system (42%), the economic system (37%) and the health care system (34%), according to the October survey.

While Black Americans are in favor of significant changes to policing, most want spending on police departments in their communities to stay the same (39%) or increase (35%). A little more than one-in-five (23%) think spending on police departments in their area should be decreased.

Black adults who favor decreases in police spending are most likely to name medical, mental health and social services (40%) as the top priority for those reappropriated funds. Smaller shares say K-12 schools (25%), roads, water systems and other infrastructure (12%), and reducing taxes (13%) should be the top priority.

Voting and ‘buying Black’ viewed as important strategies for Black community advancement

Black Americans also have clear views on the types of political and civic engagement they believe will move Black communities forward. About six-in-ten Black adults say voting (63%) and supporting Black businesses or “buying Black” (58%) are extremely or very effective strategies for moving Black people toward equality in the U.S. Smaller though still significant shares say the same about volunteering with organizations dedicated to Black equality (48%), protesting (42%) and contacting elected officials (40%).

Black adults were also asked about the effectiveness of Black economic and political independence in moving them toward equality. About four-in-ten (39%) say Black ownership of all businesses in Black neighborhoods would be an extremely or very effective strategy for moving toward racial equality, while roughly three-in-ten (31%) say the same about establishing a national Black political party. And about a quarter of Black adults (27%) say having Black neighborhoods governed entirely by Black elected officials would be extremely or very effective in moving Black people toward equality.

Most Black Americans support repayment for slavery

Discussions about atonement for slavery predate the founding of the United States. As early as 1672 , Quaker abolitionists advocated for enslaved people to be paid for their labor once they were free. And in recent years, some U.S. cities and institutions have implemented reparations policies to do just that.

Most Black Americans say the legacy of slavery affects the position of Black people in the U.S. either a great deal (55%) or a fair amount (30%), according to the survey. And roughly three-quarters (77%) say descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. should be repaid in some way.

Black adults who say descendants of the enslaved should be repaid support doing so in different ways. About eight-in-ten say repayment in the forms of educational scholarships (80%), financial assistance for starting or improving a business (77%), and financial assistance for buying or remodeling a home (76%) would be extremely or very helpful. A slightly smaller share (69%) say cash payments would be extremely or very helpful forms of repayment for the descendants of enslaved people.

Where the responsibility for repayment lies is also clear for Black Americans. Among those who say the descendants of enslaved people should be repaid, 81% say the U.S. federal government should have all or most of the responsibility for repayment. About three-quarters (76%) say businesses and banks that profited from slavery should bear all or most of the responsibility for repayment. And roughly six-in-ten say the same about colleges and universities that benefited from slavery (63%) and descendants of families who engaged in the slave trade (60%).

Black Americans are skeptical change will happen

Even though Black Americans’ visions for social change are clear, very few expect them to be implemented. Overall, 44% of Black adults say equality for Black people in the U.S. is a little or not at all likely. A little over a third (38%) say it is somewhat likely and only 13% say it is extremely or very likely.

They also do not think specific institutions will change. Two-thirds of Black adults say changes to the prison system (67%) and the courts and judicial process (65%) that would ensure fair treatment for Black people are a little or not at all likely in their lifetime. About six-in-ten (58%) say the same about policing. Only about one-in-ten say changes to policing (13%), the courts and judicial process (12%), and the prison system (11%) are extremely or very likely.

This pessimism is not only about the criminal justice system. The majority of Black adults say the political (63%), economic (62%) and health care (51%) systems are also unlikely to change in their lifetime.

Black Americans’ vision for social change includes reparations. However, much like their pessimism about institutional change, very few think they will see reparations in their lifetime. Among Black adults who say the descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. should be repaid, 82% say reparations for slavery are unlikely to occur in their lifetime. About one-in-ten (11%) say repayment is somewhat likely, while only 7% say repayment is extremely or very likely to happen in their lifetime.

Black Democrats, Republicans differ on assessments of inequality and visions for social change

Party affiliation is one key point of difference among Black Americans in their assessments of racial inequality and their visions for social change. Black Republicans and Republican leaners are more likely than Black Democrats and Democratic leaners to focus on the acts of individuals. For example, when summarizing the nature of racism against Black people in the U.S., the majority of Black Republicans (59%) say racist acts committed by individual people is a bigger problem for Black people than racism in our laws. Black Democrats (41%) are less likely to hold this view.

Black Republicans (45%) are also more likely than Black Democrats (21%) to say that Black people who cannot get ahead in the U.S. are mostly responsible for their own condition. And while similar shares of Black Republicans (79%) and Democrats (80%) say they experience racial discrimination on a regular basis, Republicans (64%) are more likely than Democrats (36%) to say that most Black people who want to get ahead can make it if they are willing to work hard.

On the other hand, Black Democrats are more likely than Black Republicans to focus on the impact that racial inequality has on Black Americans. Seven-in-ten Black Democrats (73%) say racial discrimination is the main reason many Black people cannot get ahead in the U.S, while about four-in-ten Black Republicans (44%) say the same. And Black Democrats are more likely than Black Republicans to say racism (67% vs. 46%) and police brutality (65% vs. 44%) are extremely big problems for Black people today.

Black Democrats are also more critical of U.S. institutions than Black Republicans are. For example, Black Democrats are more likely than Black Republicans to say the prison system (57% vs. 35%), policing (52% vs. 29%) and the courts and judicial process (50% vs. 35%) should be completely rebuilt for Black people to be treated fairly.

While the share of Black Democrats who want to see large-scale changes to the criminal justice system exceeds that of Black Republicans, they share similar views on police funding. Four-in-ten each of Black Democrats and Black Republicans say funding for police departments in their communities should remain the same, while around a third of each partisan coalition (36% and 37%, respectively) says funding should increase. Only about one-in-four Black Democrats (24%) and one-in-five Black Republicans (21%) say funding for police departments in their communities should decrease.

Among the survey’s other findings:

Black adults differ by age in their views on political strategies. Black adults ages 65 and older (77%) are most likely to say voting is an extremely or very effective strategy for moving Black people toward equality. They are significantly more likely than Black adults ages 18 to 29 (48%) and 30 to 49 (60%) to say this. Black adults 65 and older (48%) are also more likely than those ages 30 to 49 (38%) and 50 to 64 (42%) to say protesting is an extremely or very effective strategy. Roughly four-in-ten Black adults ages 18 to 29 say this (44%).

Gender plays a role in how Black adults view policing. Though majorities of Black women (65%) and men (56%) say police brutality is an extremely big problem for Black people living in the U.S. today, Black women are more likely than Black men to hold this view. When it comes to criminal justice, Black women (56%) and men (51%) are about equally likely to share the view that the prison system should be completely rebuilt to ensure fair treatment of Black people. However, Black women (52%) are slightly more likely than Black men (45%) to say this about policing. On the matter of police funding, Black women (39%) are slightly more likely than Black men (31%) to say police funding in their communities should be increased. On the other hand, Black men are more likely than Black women to prefer that funding stay the same (44% vs. 36%). Smaller shares of both Black men (23%) and women (22%) would like to see police funding decreased.

Income impacts Black adults’ views on reparations. Roughly eight-in-ten Black adults with lower (78%), middle (77%) and upper incomes (79%) say the descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. should receive reparations. Among those who support reparations, Black adults with upper and middle incomes (both 84%) are more likely than those with lower incomes (75%) to say educational scholarships would be an extremely or very helpful form of repayment. However, of those who support reparations, Black adults with lower (72%) and middle incomes (68%) are more likely than those with higher incomes (57%) to say cash payments would be an extremely or very helpful form of repayment for slavery.

• Black adults in the September 2020 survey only include those who say their race is Black alone and are non-Hispanic. The same is true only for the questions of improvements to Black people’s lives and equality in the United States in the October 2021 survey. Throughout the rest of this report, Black adults include those who say their race is Black alone and non-Hispanic; those who say their race is Black and at least one other race and non-Hispanic; or Black and Hispanic, unless otherwise noted. ↩

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Table of contents, race is central to identity for black americans and affects how they connect with each other, black americans’ views of and engagement with science, black catholics in america, facts about the u.s. black population, the growing diversity of black america, most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

Racial Profiling

The ACLU’s work on racial profiling encompasses major initiatives in litigation, public education, and advocacy, including lobbying for passage of data collection and anti-profiling legislation and litigating on behalf of individuals who have been victims of racial profiling.

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Racial profiling is a longstanding and deeply troubling national problem despite claims that the United States has entered a “post-racial era.” It 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 is patently illegal, violating the U.S. Constitution’s core promises of equal protection under the law to all and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. Just as importantly, 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.

“National security” has long been used to justify the unconstitutional profiling of, and discrimination against, Muslim, Black, Brown, and other historically marginalized communities. Since September 11, 2001, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian communities have been discriminatorily profiled by federal law enforcement, local police, and border officers. We have also seen federal agencies use race, ethnicity, national origin, and/or religious beliefs to profile and target Asian Americans, particularly Chinese American scientists and academics.

The federal government’s encouragement of unprecedented raids on immigrant communities and workplaces by local law enforcement in cooperation with federal agencies has targeted Latine communities in particular. These policies have unjustly expanded the purview of and undermined basic trust in local law enforcement, alienated immigrant communities, and created an atmosphere of fear. Anti-immigrant rhetoric has led to a dramatic increase in hate crimes against and racial profiling of people of color.

The ACLU’s work on racial profiling encompasses major initiatives in litigation, public education, and advocacy, including lobbying for passage of data collection and anti-profiling legislation and litigating on behalf of individuals who have been victims of racial profiling by airlines, police, and government agencies.

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What Causes Racial Profiling?

By Sarah Galbenski

Published: July 31, 2018

Rufus Scales, 26 and black, was driving his younger brother Devin to his hair-cutting class in this genteel, leafy city when they heard the siren's whoop and saw the blue light in the rearview mirror of their black pickup. Two police officers pulled them over for minor infractions that included expired plates and failing to hang a flag from a load of scrap metal in the pickup's bed. But what happened next was nothing like a routine traffic stop. Uncertain whether to get out of the car, Rufus Scales said, he reached to restrain his brother from opening the door. A black officer stunned him with a Taser, he said, and a white officer yanked him from the driver's seat. Temporarily paralyzed by the shock, he said, he fell face down, and the officer dragged him across the asphalt. (LaFraniere and Lehren)

In America today, this is a narrative that we have to come to know all too well. A young black man, either guilty of simply "driving while black" or a minor infraction, is pulled over by the police, usually in an affluent, predominately white neighborhood. Upon being pulled over, the driver is treated by the officers in a cruel manner that is not commensurate with his crime. This prevalent narrative is an example of racial profiling, which is "a form of differential treatment based on an individual's racial or ethnic social identity" (Williams 401). Although racial profiling affects many sectors of American society, particularly education and employment, for the purposes of this paper, I will be focusing on racial profiling as it pertains to law enforcement proceedings. According to Brian N. Williams, associate professor of Public Administration and Policy at The University of Georgia, "Biased policing exists when an individual's race is used as an illegitimate factor for initiating police actions against the individual" (401). So, if police officers understand that it is biased and unlawful to initiate police action against an individual because of his or her race, what causes them to continue to racially profile individuals? I contend that while racial profiling can be caused by officers feeling pressured to produce crime-reducing statistics and by those in power valuing efficacy over constitutionality, it is primarily caused by officers' implicit biases. Furthermore, it is not simply caused in reaction to an "abundance" of black crime.

Williams reports that there are "a growing number of research studies that highlight the disproportionate number of traffic and pedestrian stops and searches of minorities" (402). A likely contributing factor to this racial inequity is the fact that high crime "impact zones" tend to be comprised of mostly minority residents, and, based on interviews with the New York Police Department, Andres Garcia reported that, "Trained as they are in high crime areas, and taught that they are there to bring down crime, officers feel pressured to produce numbers and statistics, and therefore engage in stop-and-frisk practices at a disproportionate rate in these impact zones," zones which are overwhelmingly inhabited by minorities. The pressure to produce is even higher for recent recruits, fresh out of the Police Academy, who are aiming to prove themselves as bona fide members of the force. Unfortunately for the minority residents of impact zones, these eager new recruits tend to have first assignments in their neighborhoods. Since officers, especially new ones, are expected to produce crime-reducing statistics in minority populated impact zones, they often resort to racial profiling as an effective means to achieve their quota.

Although racial profiling may be considered an "effective" means to identify stop-and-frisk targets and fight crime, it is in no way constitutional. In fact, "In August 2013, Federal District Court Judge Shira A. Scheindlin ruled that the New York Police Department practice of stop-and-frisk, in which individuals are stopped for questioning and frisked for weapons, is unconstitutional because it violates the civil rights of the blacks and Latinos who are disproportionately targets of the program" (Garcia 37). Despite the unconstitutionality of the practice of stop-and-frisk due to its promotion of racial profiling, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg argued for the efficacy of stop-and-frisk and said that its practice would continue until the end of his term because he "wouldn't want to be responsible for a lot of people dying" (Garcia 38). When people in positions of power, such as Mayor Bloomberg, value efficacy over constitutionality when it comes to practices like stop-and-frisk, more occurrences of racial profiling are caused and perpetuated.

While pressure to produce crime-reducing statistics and more value placed on the efficacy than on the constitutionality of stop-and-frisk practices certainly cause racial profiling to occur, I argue that implicit biases encourage racial profiling to run rampant. Implicit biases are defined as "the stereotypes and prejudices that reside and operate in our mind outside of our conscious awareness" ("Suspect Race"). Although we may not possess awareness nor approval of our possession of these stereotypes, they are nonetheless present in our unconscious mind. As Malcolm Gladwell states in his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking , "We don't deliberately choose our unconscious attitudes…The giant computer that is our unconscious silently crunches all the data it can from experiences we've had, the people we've met, the lessons we've learned, the books we've read, the movies we've seen, and so on, and it forms an opinion" (39). In order to help us gain an understanding of our unconscious's opinions, social psychologists Anthony G. Greenwald, Mahzarin Banaji, and Brian Nosek created a series of Implicit Association Tests (IATs) designed to prove that "we make connections much more quickly between pairs of ideas that are already related in our minds than we do between pairs of words that are unfamiliar to us" (Gladwell 37). The most famous of the IATs, the Race IAT, asks participants to sort both positive and negative words, such as "fabulous" and "evil" and images of white faces and black faces into their respective categories. After the participants sort words and faces separately, they are asked to associate positive words with white faces and sort them into the same category. Conversely, negative words and black faces are related during this first part of the test. For the second part of the test, the categories switch; white is now associated with negative words, and black is now associated with positive words. The results of this test state that "more than 80 percent of all those who have taken the test end up having pro-white associations, meaning that it takes them measurably longer to complete answers when they are required to put good words into the "black" category than when they are required to link bad things with black people" (Gladwell 39).

In order to scientifically explain this difference in response time, scholars have found that "there's some evidence that the amygdala, a center in the brain for emotions, flashes a threat warning when it perceives people who look 'different'" (Kristof). However, despite this biological explanation, it is more likely that our biases are derived culturally. This is hypothesized because in actuality, "many African-Americans themselves have an unconscious pro-white bias" (Kristof). White people look "different" from black people, yet many black people do not experience these threat warnings when encountering an image of a white face, as evidenced by their quicker response time when associating white faces with positive words. Even though many people, including undoubtedly many African-Americans, explicitly repudiate the stereotype that associates minorities (particularly blacks) with crime, according to Jack Glaser, Berkeley social psychologist and author of Suspect Race: Causes and Consequences of Racial Profiling, this stereotype is still pervasive in our culture and media, and therefore still influences all of our unconscious biases, African-Americans' included. Applying this concept of implicit biases to policing, Glaser asserts, "When we're making decisions under uncertainty, we tend to use cognitive shortcuts. What might feel like a legitimate hunch to a police officer could actually be the influence of a racial stereotype." Furthermore, these stereotypes evoke a sense of fear in police officers, and when they are put into perceived life-threatening situations, they resort to simplistic, overzealous responses.

Yet another view that has prevailed in American society for decades is that an "abundance" of black crime justly causes racial profiling, reactionary policing, and sometimes even "necessary" forms of police brutality. However, "far from being a novel bit of truth-telling, the argument that black crime is the cause of reactionary policing is among the aged and easily refuted clichés of American racial history" (Cobb). Jelani Cobb, the Ira A. Lipman Professor of Journalism at Columbia University, finds it ironic that this view is mostly held by American conservatives because "the idea that the treatment of an individual hinges upon his or her demographic category flies in the face of the doctrine of individual rights central to modern conservatism." Yet this revered doctrine of individual rights still pertains to the white population of our country, for although "the white-on-white mayhem is profound" as white people are six times more likely to be murdered by a white person than a black person, "no one speaks of it in racial terms" (Dyson 149). In our country, white is the default race. And, as the Race IAT demonstrates, it is far easier for the majority of our population to implicitly (and racially) associate whites with good terms and blacks with evil ones. When a black person commits a crime against their brethren, it is immediately racially labeled. Conversely, when a white person commits the same crime against one of their own, they are not lumped in with the rest of their race but are instead treated as singular beings:

That's because the phrase white-on-white crime doesn't serve a larger ideological purpose. White-on-white crime does not jibe with the exclusive focus on a black-on-black narrative that conservatives and liberals too, have bought into. The success of that narrative depends on a few things. You had to construct the ghetto as a space of savagery that was unique to black folk…Then you had to say that any right-thinking folk wouldn't kill each other. (Dyson 149)

The cultural narrative strikes again, construing blacks as savages, portraying whites as upright citizens, and unconsciously influencing us all. Furthermore, do blacks really commit more crimes or are they simply arrested for them at higher rates? In the case of drug crimes, "blacks are nearly four times as likely as whites to be arrested for drug possession. This is despite the evidence that whites and blacks use drugs at roughly the same rate" In fact, "from 1995 to 2005, African Americans comprised approximately 13% of drug users but 36% of drug arrests and 46% of those convicted for drug offenses" (Nellis). The absurdity of the excuse that "horrific black crime" triggers racial profiling is quite evident. Whites use drugs at the same rate. And, "white folk consistently lead all other groups in assault, larceny, illegal weapons possession, arson, and vandalism" (Dyson 149). Once again, it has been proven that indoctrinated cultural biases influence the police's perceptions on black crime. They are not solely combatting a "radical disproportion" of black crime.

In the case of Rufus Scales, it is highly probable that before the police officers even identified his minor infractions, they unconsciously associated his blackness with crime. It is important to note that they possessed this implicit bias through no fault of their own. Since this stereotype is perpetuated by our culture, both black and white officers have no choice but to be inundated with examples of this black crime association in the media and society at large. However, their hamartia, their fatal flaw, occurred when they failed to recognize that they were under the influence of a racial stereotype and proceeded to abuse Scales out of fear. Although it is important to admit that we all fall prey to implicit biases, it is absolutely paramount to recognize when our biases cloud our vision and proactively choose to act out of rationality and respect, not out of fear. Whether or not Scales was in an impact zone or under the jurisdiction of a mayor who believed in efficacy over constitutionality, he will always be subject to officers operating by implicit biases. For this reason, it is of the utmost importance that officers are trained to understand implicit biases in hopes of reducing the number of occurrences of racial profiling. And, on a larger scale, it is crucial that we understand our own implicit biases so that we can be able to recognize the singularity of every human being instead of associating them with a stereotype.

Works Cited

Cobb, Jelani. "No Such Thing as Racial Profiling." The New Yorker, 4 Dec. 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/eric-garner-racial-profiling . Accessed 21 November 2017.

Dyson, Michael Eric. "Our Own Worst Enemy?" Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, St. Martin's Press, 2017, 143-169.

Garcia, Andres. "Stop-and-frisk: the policing of Latinos in New York." NACLA Report on the Americas, vol. 46, no. 4, 2013, pp. 37+. Global Issues in Context, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A355468776/GIC?u=nd_ref&xid=87fec209 . Accessed 6 November 2017.

Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2005.

Glaser, Jack. "Suspect Race: Causes and Consequences of Racial Profiling." News Center: Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California Berkeley , 24 Nov. 2014, https://gspp.berkeley.edu/news/news-center/suspect-race-causes-and-consequences-of- %09racial-profiling . Accessed 6 November 2017.

Kristof, Nicholas D. "What? Me Biased?" The New York Times, 30 Oct. 2008, p. A39(L). Global Issues in Context, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A188025544/GIC?u=nd_ref&xid=5294534d . Accessed 6 November 2017.

LaFraniere, Sharon, and Andrew W. Lehren. "The Disproportionate Risks of Driving While Black." The New York Times , 24 Oct. 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/us/racial-disparity-traffic-stops-driving-black.html . Accessed 6 November 2017.

Norris, Ashley. "The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prison." The Sentencing Project, 14 June 2016, http://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/color- of-justice-racial-and-ethnic-disparity-in-state-prisons/ . Accessed 21 November 2017.

Williams, Brian N. "Racial Profiling and Biased Policing." Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, edited by Patrick L. Mason, 2 nd ed., vol. 3, Macmillan Reference USA, 2013, pp. 401- 406. Global Issues in Context, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX4190600368/GIC?u=nd_ref&xid=f71f76de . Accessed 6 November 2017.

• To what extent does Galbenski demonstrate fairness/evenhandedness in her argument regarding the causes of racial profiling? Are you convinced by her argument, or do you see it as a function of her own implicit bias? Point to specific evidence from the essay to support your claims.
• How does Galbenski work to establish her credibility with her reader? To what extent is she successful in doing so?
• Comment on the effectiveness of Galbenski's use of the Rufus Scales story as a framing device. What kind of response did that story invite from you as a reader?

Sarah Galbenski

Racial Profiling Essay: Outline, Examples, & Writing Tips

Racial profiling is not uncommon. It’s incredibly offensive and unfair behavior that causes most of the protests in support of people of color. It occurs when people are suspected of committing a crime based on their skin color or ethnicity.

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Unfortunately, most people are unaware that racial profiling is an everyday phenomenon that harms both the victims and society. Therefore, it’s crucial that we highlight this issue in as many ways as possible. One of the options is expressing your opinion through writing. A racial profiling essay can be inspiring and persuasive. All the power is in your hands, so let’s figure out how to use it! Keep reading this guide made by Custom-writing.org experts.

The article contains a writing guide, a collection of racial profiling essay topics, ideas, and examples, as well as the tips on making a racial profiling essay outline. We hope that it will inspire you to make an A+ argumentative racial profiling essay or even a persuasive speech on the topic!

🤔 What Is a Racial Profiling Essay about?

• 📑 Making an Outline
• 👌 Writing Tips

📝 Racial Profiling Essay Examples

🔗 references.

There is more than one objective for writing a racial profiling essay. First of all, it can be as simple as expressing your feelings about it. For example, you might consider pointing out how unfair and unjustified those actions are. Moreover, if you’re a law student, you should definitely back up those conclusions with the extractions from the Constitution.

You can then focus on describing the impact it has on society, which makes a fantastic cause and effect essay. There are so many more topic ideas, but if you’re feeling stuck, go ahead to the article’s next sections!

Argumentative Racial Profiling Essay

To write a successful argumentative racial profiling essay, you need to focus on investigating the topic to express your perspective later. Every statement you include in the main body of the writing should be supported by evidence. The essential part of such an essay is a clear thesis statement! And if you struggle to come up with a good one yourself, you can get help from a thesis statement generator online .

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Persuasive Racial Profiling Essay

Unlike the type discussed above, a persuasive racial profiling essay should aim to convince your readers that your point of view is the only correct one. Instead of just presenting your point of view, you need to gather the most convincing facts that can influence your audience. It requires expertise in the topic of racial profiling.

Racial Profiling Essay Topics

Looking for a racial profiling essay topic ? Find a short and sweet topic collection below.

• The impact of racial profiling on the US society. For this essay, you would need to study how citizens react to racial profiling. You might also include some statistics from the previous years.
• Present your point of view on the issue of racial profiling . If you ever faced it yourself, your reflective essay would be even more powerful! Include as much evidence as you can.
• Racial profiling: are African Americans overreacting? Someone feels like people might be taking this issue too personally. Therefore, you should provide strong arguments to point out how discriminating those actions are.
• Accepting racial profiling as a common practice. Express your opinion on this topic. Do you think police should be legally allowed to practice racial profiling? Why would it be a violation of rights?
• Racial profiling from a psychological perspective. Try to analyze this occurrence as if you were a professional psychologist. What do you think makes law enforcement act this way?
• Does racism impact the US immigration?
• Discuss the definition and origins of racial profiling .
• Analyze the aim and values of the Black Life Matter movement.
• Racial stereotypes in Disney films.
• Examine the problem of workplace racism .
• How can racism in medicine be eliminated?
• What is the colorblind racism ?
• Describe your personal experience of racism .
• Compare the ways South Africa and the US are handling racism .
• The goals of the Black Lives Matter movement.
• Explain why racism is a persistent problem in modern society.
• Explore the concept of racial profiling in the “war on drugs.”
• Childhood under the racist laws of apartheid in Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime .
• Discuss the effect of racism on child development .
• Is there a racial disparity gap in healthcare?
• Describe the problems racism causes in American schools .
• How does racism affect modern society?
• Racial stereotypes in music video .
• The pros and cons of racial profiling in the airports.
• Describe the specifics of colorblind racism .
• Discuss the possible solutions of racial profiling problem.
• Terrorist attacs in 9/11, hate crimes, and racial profiling .
• Is institutionalized racism a real problem or a myth?
• Racial and ethnical prejudices in breast cancer treatment .
• Examine the cases of racism against healthcare workers and their consequences.
• Analyze the impact of racism on globalization .
• Describe and characterize the main types of modern racism .
• Racial profiling of minority groups in the US .
• Is racial discrimination issue completely eliminated from American society?
• Evaluate the racial inequalities in the US judicial system .
• Describe how race relations are represented in Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward .
• Analyze the difference between individual and institutional racism .
• Investigation of the history of racism in The Case for Reparations by Coates .
• Is racial profiling a discrimination or a necessary evil?
• Ways of dealing with racism in American education .
• Examine the history of racial stereotypes in the US.
• Explain why racial profiling is a violation of human rights.
• Catastrophic consequences of discrimination and racial prejudice in the film A Soldier’s Story .
• Racism as a global issue.
• Discuss the causes and ehhects of racism in America .
• What can be done to resolve the problem of racism at interactional level ?
• Analyze the issue of racial profiling of drivers.
• Describe the problem of racism and discrimination from the perspective of social psychology.
• Discuss the methods of solving the problem of policing racism .
• Examine the cases of racism in social work environment.

📑 Racial Profiling Essay Outline

Whichever type of racial profiling essay you choose to work on, the basic writing strategy remains the same. After you pick up the suitable title and finish your research, it’s time to reorganize the main ideas. The best way to do it is to create a racial profiling essay outline that serves as a foundation for your future essay.

There are three elements that any essay must have:

• Introduction

The main body should have at least three paragraphs in which you present your arguments supported by evidence.

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Racial Profiling Essay Introduction

It is a good idea to start your essay with a hook – a statement that aims to grab your reader’s attention. In your racial profiling essay introduction, you could use some impressive statistics that illustrate the problem of racial discrimination or describe a real-life situation.

At this stage, it’s also essential that you think about composing a racial profiling thesis statement . It goes as the last sentence of the introduction and becomes the focal point of your whole writing. The thesis statement includes your opinion and a short description of your arguments.

Racial Profiling Essay Conclusion

In conclusion, you should summarize your arguments and paraphrase your racial profiling thesis statement. It is also a good idea to add some information about the most important findings. This way, your essay would be both informative and persuasive.

👌 Racial Profiling Essay: Writing Tips

Let us remind you of some basic rules you should stick to while writing:

• Introduce your position on the problem and, at least, three major points in the thesis statement of your racial profiling essay.
• Gather enough facts and pieces of evidence to support your points.
• Do not forget to study the arguments of the opposing side.

Before you get down to writing your essay on racial profiling, try to answer the following questions:

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• When did racial profiling start?
• Why does it happen?
• What consequences does it lead to?

Try to find some statistical data to include in your essay on racial profiling. Be careful with sources and information. The point is that racial profiling is unconstitutional, which is why you will not find official data, something like police reports, etc. Thus, use only credible online and printed sources when writing your papers on racial profiling.

There is also a way to show your creativity in the essay on racial profiling. You may play the devil advocate’s role and support it in the paper on racial profiling. We are sure this unusual approach will impress your teacher!

Below you’ll find links to 3 racial profiling essay examples. We hope that they will inspire you to write an A+ paper on racism and discrimination.

The modern globalized society provides numerous opportunities for improved communication and increased mutual understanding. However, there are still such problems as discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, mentality, sex, or gender, biased attitudes to some minorities, and widespread stereotypical thinking.

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The system of racism entails degrading and harmful actions and beliefs that are implemented and expressed by both groups of people. Racism over the years has been one of the reasons behind poverty and lack of access to social mobility in the United States.

Racial identity and racial socialization are proposed to promote the improvement of African American adolescents in the aspect of race-related difficulties. Current studies pointed out that discrimination is a condition that has harmful effects on the mental health of African Americans.

So, good luck with your papers on racial profiling! Do not hesitate to visit our blog if you have trouble with terrorism essays or any other written assignment.

• Racial Profiling: Definition | American Civil Liberties Union
• This is why everyday racial profiling is so dangerous – CNN
• Racial profiling – AP News
• Racial profiling: Germany debating police methods – DW
• Psychology responds to racial profiling
• Racial Profiling – Equal Justice Initiative
• Racial Profiling: Past, Present, and Future?
• Racial profiling | Independent
• Racial Profiling – University of Michigan Law School
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Report Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the Criminal Justice System

Easily browse the critical components of this report…

Introduction

Throughout the nation, people of color are far more likely to enter the nation’s justice system than the general population. State and federal governments are aware of this disparity, and researchers and policymakers are studying the drivers behind the statistics and what strategies might be employed to address the disparities, ensuring evenhanded processes at all points in the criminal justice system. This primer highlights data, reports, state laws, innovations, commissions, approaches and other resources addressing racial and ethnic disparities within our country’s justice systems, to provide information for the nation’s decision-makers, state legislators.

Examining the Data and Innovative Justice Responses to Address Disparities

For states to have a clear understanding of the extent of racial and ethnic disparities in the states, they need to have data from all stages of the criminal justice system.

1. Law Enforcement

Disparities within traffic stops.

Contact with law enforcement, particularly at traffic stops, is often the most common interaction people have with the criminal legal system.

According to a  large-scale analysis of racial disparities in police stops across the United States , “police stop and search decisions suffer from persistent racial bias.” The study, the largest to date, analyzed data on approximately 95 million stops from 21 state patrol agencies and 35 municipal police departments across the country. The authors found Black drivers were less likely to be stopped after sunset, when it is more difficult to determine a driver’s race, suggesting bias in stop decisions. Furthermore, by examining the rate at which stopped drivers were searched and turned up contraband, the study found that the bar for searching Black and Hispanic drivers was lower than that for searching white drivers.

The study also investigated the effects of legalization of recreational cannabis on racial disparities in stop outcomes—specifically examining Colorado and Washington, two of the first states to legalize the substance. It found that following the legalization of cannabis, the number of total searches fell substantially. The authors theorized this may have been due to legalization removing a common reason officers cite for conducting searches. Nevertheless, Black and Hispanic drivers were still more likely to be searched than white drivers were post-legalization.

Data Collection Requirements in Statute

At least 23 states and the District of Columbia have laws related to or requiring collection of data when an individual is stopped by law enforcement. Some of these laws specifically prohibit racial profiling or require departments to adopt a policy to the same effect. Collection of demographic data can serve as a means of ensuring compliance with those provisions or informing officials on current practices so they can respond accordingly.

States have employed many reporting or other requirements for evaluation of the data collected under these laws. For example, Montana requires agencies to adopt a policy that provides for periodic reviews to “determine whether any peace officers of the law enforcement agency have a pattern of stopping members of minority groups for violations of vehicle laws in a number disproportionate to the population of minority groups residing or traveling within the jurisdiction…”

Maryland’s law requires local agencies to report their data to the Maryland Statistical Analysis Center. The center is then tasked with analyzing the annual reports from local agencies and posting the data in an online display that is filtered by jurisdiction and by each data point collected by officers.

The amount and kind of data collected also varies state by state. Some states leave the specifics to local jurisdictions or require the creation of a form based on statutory guidance, but most require the collection of demographic data including race, ethnicity, color, age, gender, minority group or state of residence. Notably, Missouri’s law requires collection of the following 10 data points:

• The age, gender and race or minority group of the individual stopped.
• The reasons for the stop.
• Whether a search was conducted because of the stop.
• If a search was conducted, whether the individual consented to the search, the probable cause for the search, whether the person was searched, whether the person’s property was searched, and the duration of the search.
• Whether any contraband was discovered during the search and the type of any contraband discovered.
• Whether any warning or citation was issued because of the stop.
• If a warning or citation was issued, the violation charged or warning provided.
• Whether an arrest was made because of either the stop or the search.
• If an arrest was made, the crime charged.
• The location of the stop.

State laws differ as to what kind of stop triggers a data reporting requirement. For example, Florida’s law applies to stops where citations are issued for violations of the state’s safety belt law. While Virginia’s law is broader, requiring all law enforcement to collect data pertaining to all investigatory motor vehicle stops, all stop-and-frisks of a person and all other investigatory detentions that do not result in arrest or the issuance of a summons.

Cultural Competency and Bias Reduction Training for Law Enforcement

At least 48 states and the District of Columbia have statutory training requirements for law enforcement. These laws require law enforcement personnel statewide to be trained on specific topics during their initial training and/or at recurring intervals, such as in-service training or continuing education.

In most states, the law simply requires training on a subject, leaving the specifics to be determined by state training boards or other local authorities designated by law. However, some states, such as Iowa and West Virginia, have very detailed requirements and even specify how many hours are required, the subject of the training, required content, whether the training must be received in person and who is approved to provide the training.

Overall, at least 26 states mandate some form of bias reduction training. Find out more about these laws on NCSL’s Law Enforcement Training webpage.

Law Enforcement Employment and Labor Policies

States have also addressed equity and accountability in policing through certification and accountability measures and hiring practices.

For example, a 2020 California law ( AB 846 ) changed state certification requirements by expanding current officer evaluations to screen for various kinds of bias in addition to physical, emotional or mental conditions that might adversely affect an officer’s exercise of peace officer powers. The law also requires the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training to study, review and update regulations and screening materials to identify explicit and implicit bias against race or ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion, disability or sexual orientation related to emotional and mental condition evaluations.

In addition to screening, the California law requires every department or agency that employs peace officers to review the job descriptions used in recruitment and hiring and to make changes that deemphasize the paramilitary aspects of the job. The intent is to place more emphasis on community interaction and collaborative problem-solving.

Nevada ( AB 409 ), in 2021, added to statutory certification requirements mandating evaluation of officer recruits to identify implicit bias on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, physical or mental disability, sexual orientation or gender identity expression. That same year, Nevada also enacted legislation ( SB 236 ) that requires law enforcement agencies to establish early warning systems to identify officers who display bias indicators or demonstrate other problematic behavior. It also requires increased supervision, training and, if appropriate, counseling to officers identified by the system. If an officer is repeatedly identified by the early warning system, the law requires the employing agency to consider consequences, including transfer from high-profile assignments or other means of discipline.

Another area of interest for states has been hiring a more diverse workforce in law enforcement and support agencies. For example, New Jersey SB 2767  (2020) required the state Civil Service Commission to conduct a statewide diversity analysis of the ethnic and racial makeup of all law enforcement agencies in the state.

Finally, at least one state addressed bias in policing through a state civil rights act. Massachusetts ( SB 2963 ) established a state right to bias-free professional policing. Conduct against an aggrieved person resulting in decertification by the Police Office Standards and Training Commission constitute a prima-facie violation of the right to bias-free professional policing. The law also specifies that no officer is immune from civil liability for violating a person’s right to bias-free professional policing if the conduct results in officer decertification.

Disproportionality of Native Americans in the Justice System According to the U.S. Department of Justice, from 2015 to 2019, the number of American Indian or Alaska Native justice-involved individuals housed in local jails for federal correctional authorities, state prison authorities or tribal governments increased by  3.6% . Though American Indian and Alaska Natives make up a small proportion of the national incarcerated population relative to other ethnicities, some jurisdictions are finding they are disproportionately represented in the justice system. For example, in  Pennington County , S.D., it is estimated that 10% to 25% of the county’s residents are Native American, but they account for 55% of the county’s jail population. Similarly, Montana’s Commission on Sentencing  found  that while Native Americans represent 7% of the state’s general population, they comprised 17% of those incarcerated in correctional facilities in 2014 and 19% of the state’s total arrests in 2015.

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2. pretrial release and prosecution, risk assessments.

Recently, state laws have authorized or required courts to use pretrial risk assessment tools. There are about  two dozen pretrial risk assessment tools in use  across the states. 

Laws in Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Indiana, Kentucky, New Jersey and Vermont require courts to adopt or consider risk assessments in at least some, if not all, cases on a statewide basis. While laws in Colorado, Illinois, Montana, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia and West Virginia authorize or encourage, but do not require, adopting a risk assessment tool on a statewide basis.

This broad state adoption of risk assessment tools raises concern that systemic bias may impact their use. In 2014, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder  said  pretrial risk assessment tools “may exacerbate unwarranted and unjust disparities that are already far too common in our criminal justice system and our society.”

More than 100 civil rights organizations expressed similar concerns in  a statement  following a 2017 convening. The dependance of pretrial risk assessment tools on data that reflect systemic bias is the crux of the issue. The statement highlights that police officers disproportionately arrest people of color, which impacts risk assessment tools that rely on arrest data. The statement then set out key principles mitigating harm that may be caused by risk assessments, recognizing their broad use across the country.

The conversation about bias in pretrial risk assessments is ongoing. In 2021, the Urban Institute published the report “ Racial Equity and Criminal Justice Risk Assessment .” In the report, the authors discuss and make recommendations for policymakers to balance the use of risk assessment as a component of evidence-based practice with pursuing goals of reducing racial and ethnic disparities. The authors state that “carefully constructed and properly used risk assessment instruments that account for fairness can help limit racial bias in criminal justice decision-making.”

Academic studies show varied results related to the use of risk assessments and their effect on racial and ethnic disparities in the justice system. One study, “ Racist Algorithms or Systemic Problems ,” concludes “there is currently no valid evidence that instruments in general are biased against individuals of color,” and, “Where bias has been found, it appears to have more to do with the specific risk instrument.” In another study, “ Employing Standardized Risk Assessment in Pretrial Release Decisions ,” the authors, without making causal conclusions, find that “despite comparable risk scores, African American participants were detained significantly longer than Caucasian participants … and were less likely to receive diversion opportunity.”

In a recent report titled “ Civil Rights and Pretrial Risk Assessment Instruments ,” the authors recommend steps to protect civil rights when risk assessment tools are used. The report underscores the importance of expansive transparency throughout design and implementation of these tools. It also suggests more community oversight and governance that promotes reduced incarceration and racially equitable outcomes. Finally, the report suggests decisions made by judges to detain should be rare, deliberate and not dependent solely on pretrial risk assessment instruments.

States are starting to regulate the use of risk assessments and promote best practices by requiring the tool to be validated on a regular basis, be free from racial or gender bias and that documents, data and records related to the tool be publicly available.

For example, California (2019  SB 36 ) requires a pretrial services agency validate pretrial risk assessment tools on a regular basis and to make specified information regarding the tool, including validation studies, publicly available. The law also requires the judicial council to maintain a list of pretrial services agencies that have satisfied the validation requirements and complied with the transparency requirements. California published its most recent validation  report  in June 2021.

Similarly, Idaho (2019  HB 118 ) now requires all documents, data, records and information used to build and validate a risk assessment tool to be publicly available for inspection, auditing and testing. The law requires public availability of ongoing documents, data, records and written policies on usage and validation of a tool. It also authorizes defendants to have access to calculations and data related to their own risk score and prohibits the use of proprietary tools.

Pretrial Release

A  recent report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights  evaluates the civil rights implications of pretrial release systems across the country.

Notable findings from the report include stark racial and gender disparities in pretrial populations with higher detention rates and financial conditions of release imposed on minority populations. The report also finds that more than 60% of defendants are detained pretrial because of an inability to pay financial conditions of release. 

States have recently enacted legislation to address defendants’ ability to pay financial conditions of release, with at least 11 states requiring courts to conduct ability-to-pay considerations when setting release conditions.  NCSL’s Statutory Framework of Pretrial Release report  has additional information about state approaches to pretrial release.

Prosecutorial Discretion

Prosecutorial discretion is a term used to describe the power of prosecutors to decide whether to charge a person for a crime, which criminal charges to file and whether to enter into a plea agreement. Some argue this discretion can be a source of disparities within the criminal justice system.

The  Prosecutorial Performance Indicators  (PPI), developed by Florida International University and Loyola University Chicago, is an example of an effort to address this. PPI provides prosecutors’ offices with a method to measure their performance through several indicators, including racial and ethnic disparities. As part of their work to bring accountability and oversight to prosecutorial discretion, PPI has created six measures specifically related to racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system. The PPI measures include the following:

• Victimization of Racial/Ethnic Minorities.
• Case Dismissal Differences by Victim Race/Ethnicity.
• Case Filing Differences by Defendant Race/Ethnicity.
• Pretrial Detention Differences by Defendant Race/Ethnicity.
• Diversion Differences by Defendant Race/Ethnicity.
• Charging and Plea Offer Differences by Defendant Race/Ethnicity.

Below is a table highlighting disparity  data discovered through the use of PPI measures , gathered from specific jurisdictions.

Young People in the Justice System

As is the case in the adult system, compared to young white people, youth of color are disproportionately represented at every stage in the nation’s juvenile justice system. Overall juvenile placements  fell by 54%  between 2001 and 2015, but the placement rate for Black youth was 433 per 100,000, compared to a white youth placement rate of 86 per 100,000. According to a report from the Prison Policy Initiative, an advocacy organization, titled “ Youth Confinement: The Whole Pie 2019 ,” 14% of all those younger than 18 in the U.S. are Black, but they make up 42% of the boys and 35% of the girls in juvenile facilities. Additionally, Native American and Hispanic girls and boys are also overrepresented in the juvenile justice system relative to their share of the total youth population.  Information  from California reveals that prosecutors send Hispanic youth to adult court via “direct file” at over three times the rate of white youth.

At the federal level, the 2018 reauthorized  Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act  requires states to identify and analyze data on race and ethnicity in state, local and tribal juvenile justice systems. States must identify disparities and develop and implement work plans to address them. States are required to document how they are addressing racial and ethnic disparities and establish a coordinating body composed of juvenile justice stakeholders to advise states, units of local government and Native American tribes. If a state fails to meet the act’s requirements, it will result in a 20% reduction of formula grant funding.

An example of a coordinating council that has examined extensive data is the Equity and Justice for All Youth Subcommittee of the  Georgia Juvenile Justice State Advisory Group . The group conducted a county-by-county assessment and analysis of disproportionality in Georgia and found one of the most effective ways to reduce disproportionate treatment of youth is to reduce harsh disciplinary measures in schools. This in turn helps reduce disproportionate referrals to the system.

3. Incarceration

Incarceration statistics help paint a picture of the disparities in the criminal justice system. Significant racial and ethnic disparities can be seen in both jails and prisons. According to the MacArthur Foundation’s  Safety and Justice Challenge website , “While Black and Latinx people make up 30% of the U.S. population, they account for 51% of the jail population.”

An  October 2021 report  from The Sentencing Project, an organization advocating for criminal justice reform, found that “Black Americans are incarcerated in state prisons across the country at nearly five times the rate of whites, and Latinx people are 1.3 times as likely to be incarcerated than non-Latinx whites.” At the time of the report, there were 12 states where more than half of the prison population is Black and seven states with a disparity between the Black and white imprisonment rate of more than 9 to 1.

To have a clearer sense of the racial makeup of who is incarcerated at any given time, some systems developed data dashboards to provide information on their jail populations. In Allegheny County, Pa., for instance, the  jail data dashboard  is publicly available and provides a range of information on who is incarcerated in the jail. The dashboard provides an up-to-the-day look at the race, gender and age of the jail population. According to the dashboard, on average from Jan. 1, 2019, to mid-November 2021, 65% of individuals in the jail were Black.

Dashboards may also be established by the individual state, though these generally look back over a specified time, rather than providing a close-to-live look at the jail population. Colorado passed a law in 2019 ( HB 1297 ) requiring county jails to collect certain data and report it to the state Division of Criminal Justice on a quarterly basis. That data is compiled in a publicly available  Jail Data Dashboard . The dashboard includes information on the racial and ethnic makeup of jail populations in the state. In the second quarter of 2021, 88% of people incarcerated in jails in the state were white, 16% were Black, 2% were Native American and 1% were classified as “other race.” In the same quarter, ethnicity data for incarcerated people showed 67% were non-Hispanic, 33% were Hispanic and 9% were classified with “unknown ethnicity.”

Pennsylvania’s Department of Corrections has an online  dashboard  providing similar information for the state prison population. The dashboard shows Black people make up 12% of the state’s overall population but 44% of the population in state correctional institutions, while white people make up 74% of the state population and 45% of the state prison population. While dashboards themselves don’t reduce disparities, they help create a clearer understanding of them.

4. Sentencing

Racial and ethnic disparities can also be seen in the sentencing of individuals following a criminal conviction. The use of sentencing enhancements and federal drug sentencing both provide examples of the disparities in sentencing.

Sentencing enhancements in California  have been found  to be applied disproportionately to people of color and individuals with mental illness according to the state’s  Committee on Revision of the Penal Code . More than 92% of the people sentenced for a gang enhancement in the state, for instance, are Black or Hispanic. The state has more than 150 different sentence enhancements and more than 80% of people incarcerated in the state are subject to a sentence enhancement.

In response to recommendations from the committee,  AB 333  was enacted in 2021 to modify the state’s gang enhancement statutes by reducing the list of crimes under which use of the current charge alone creates proof of a “pattern” of criminal gang activity and separates gang allegations from underlying charges at trial.

Impact Statements and Legislative Task Forces

Racial impact statements and data.

Legislatures are currently taking many steps to increase their understanding of racial and ethnic disparities in the justice system. In some states, this has taken the form of racial and ethnic impact statements or corrections impact statements.

At least 18 states require  corrections impact statements  for legislation that would make changes to criminal offenses and penalties. These look at the fiscal impact of policy changes on correctional populations and criminal justice resources. A few states have required the inclusion of information on the impacts of policy changes on certain racial and ethnic groups.

Colorado has taken this approach. The state enacted  legislation in 2013  (SB 229) requiring corrections fiscal notes to include information on gender and minority data. In 2019, the state passed  legislation  (HB 1184) requiring the staff of the legislative council to prepare demographic notes for certain bills. These notes use “available data to outline the potential effects of a legislative measure on disparities within the state, including a statement of whether the measure is likely to increase or decrease disparities to the extent the data is available.”

Other states with laws requiring racial and ethnic impact statements include  Connecticut ,  Iowa ,  Maine ,  New Hampshire ,  New Jersey ,  Oregon  and  Virginia . Additionally, Florida  announced  a  partnership  in July 2019 “between the Florida Senate and Florida State University’s College of Criminology & Criminal Justice to analyze racial and ethnic impacts of proposed legislation.”  Minnesota’s Sentencing Commission has compiled racial impact statements for the legislature since 2006, though this is not required in law.

Legislative Studies and Task Forces

States are also taking a closer look at racial disparities within criminal justice systems by creating legislative studies or judicial task forces. These bodies examined disproportionalities in the criminal justice system, investigated possible causes and recommended solutions.

In 2018, Vermont  legislatively established  the state’s  Racial Disparities in the Criminal and Juvenile Justice System Advisory Panel . The panel submitted its  report to the General Assembly  in 2019. Part of the report recommended instituting a public complaint process with the state’s Human Rights Commission to address perceived implicit bias across all state government systems. It also recommended training first responders to identify mental health needs, educating all law enforcement officers on bias and racial disparities and adopting a community policing paradigm. Finally, the panel agreed that increased and improved data collection was important to combat racial and ethnic disparities in the justice system. The panel recommended “developing laws and rules that will require data collection that captures high-impact, high-discretion decision points that occur during the judicial processes.”

State lawmakers are well positioned to make policy changes to address the racial and ethnic disparities that research has shown are present throughout the criminal justice system. As they continue to develop a greater understanding of these disparities, state legislatures have an opportunity to make their systems fairer for all individuals who encounter the justice system, with the goal of  reducing or eliminating racial and ethnic disparities. 

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110 Racial Profiling Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best racial profiling topic ideas & essay examples, 📌 most interesting racial profiling topics to write about, 👍 good research topics about racial profiling, ❓ research questions about racial profiling.

• Benefits of Racial Profiling The objective of the essay is to explore the pros of racial profiling and offer argumentative support on the same. From a proponent perspective and as a strong supporter of racial profiling, I am of […]
• George Zimmerman Case and Racial Profiling He attested that most of the witnesses in the case had made calls to 991 immediately after the Martin was shot. We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• The True Danger of Racial Profiling In the context of fig. In turn, while the context of fig.
• Ethics of Racial Profiling in the United States Racial profiling can be referred to as the process of law enforcement personnel identifying someone as a suspect of criminal activity due to the race, nationality, or faith of the individual in question.
• The Issue of Racial Profiling The fact that few stereotypes created by law enforcement agencies can contribute to the more significant levels of racism and discrimination in this sphere. Legal structures that ban race prejudice and may apply to the […]
• Racial Profiling in Cultural Psychology The idea that some cultures are superior to others is compatible with the issue of racial identity non-apparently existing in society.
• The Practice of Racial Profiling The main example is the White drivers who were stopped at a significantly lower rate, as well as the members of the Asian population of the county.
• Racial Profiling: Term Definition A study of history can easily reveal the folly of classifying people, in ancient times there used to be a derogatory term that a rich and powerful civilization used to describe others.
• Racial Profiling by Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office The ACLU iterates that MCSO deputies are in the habit of “sacrificing the rights and well-being of workers in the name of immigration enforcement”.
• Racial Profiling by Police: Effects and Possible Remedies When the police engage in racial profiling mistrust between the public and the police arises. The causes of such mistrust may be due to poor communication between law enforcement individuals and community members due to […]
• Racial Profiling: Personal Investigation According to Jim, the reason why there is racial profiling is that a lot of black people and Hispanics are involved in crime than white people.
• Racial Profiling Goes Beyond Black and White or Red and Blue As a result of this instant impression, relations between the natives and the Europeans were never given a chance to truly flourish, eventually leading to the near genocide of the native race.
• Policy: Overcoming Racial Profiling The provisions and procedures of the policy are concerned with following the practices and principles of positive change within law enforcement.
• “Everything Isn’t Racial Profiling” by Linda Chavez This thesis is exemplified by such statements as, “But there are times when it makes sense to include race or national origin in a larger, criminal profile, particularly if you are dealing with a crime […]
• Sociological Issues: Racial Profiling Another argument advanced against racial profiling is that it is an inefficient method of ensuring that members of the public are safe.this is because when law enforcement is conducted based on general characteristics such as […]
• Conflict Theory: Racial Profiling The paper is claimed to overview the policy of racial profiling in a particular city, and provide the research, based on the sociological conflict theory, including the information gathered by the means of survey and […]
• Racial Profiling of Italian-Americans in Society Italian Americans are defined as Italian immigrants living in the United States of America or someone born in the United States with an Italian heritage.
• Teenage and Racial Profiling in the United States This paper takes the position that there is an effective solution to reduce or eliminate the prevalence of teenage and racial profiling in a certain place in the US by using the experience of other […]
• Criminal Law: Racial Profiling by Police As a rule, when detecting the primary factors affecting the changes in the racial profiling rates among the representatives of the law enforcement, one brings up the concepts of race and social class, stating that […]
• Terrorism, Hate Crimes and Racial Profiling The Patriotic Act defines domestic terrorism as an act dangerous to human life, which violates criminal laws of the USA and is aimed to intimidate the civilian population and influence the government policies through coercion […]
• Racial Profiling in the United States Shelby reveals that the effects of such events have been seen in the reduced number of crimes that have improved the quality of life in the US.
• Racial Profiling and the Killing of Michael Brown The truth is, according to professor Kelley, that the racial homicide and violence committed in these areas is caused by the police and not the black community living in the areas.
• Racial Profiling: Looking Middle Eastern It is important to note that the 19 highjackers of the planes that bombed the Twin Towers were between the age of 18 and 23 years, and were from the Middle East.
• Racial Profiling in America The government, as well as society, used to believe that the use of drugs is a culturally-based phenomenon that served as an excuse to target representatives of color minorities and was considered as the effective […]
• Practice and Concept of Racial Profiling Both of these definitions, of course, were meant to expose the policy of racial profiling as being inheritably wicked and above all – scientifically unsubstantiated, as definitions’ very sounding implies that there is no link […]
• Racial Profiling Towards Arabs in America Although the 9/11 attacks presented lawmakers and enforcers with the problem of ensuring the security of Americans, the practice of racial profiling and racially motivated attacks within the United States quickly emerged and provided a […]
• Critique: “Everything Isn’t Racial Profiling” by Linda Chavez One of the topics on the agenda of the world peace and security, the issue of racial profiling is well worth taking a closer look at.
• Racial Profiling: Discrimination the People of Color The way in which the justice system handled the circumstances behind the death of the black teenager represents a society that is less concerned with the plight of the black minority in the nation.
• Debate on the Racial Profiling in the USA The extent of racial profiling has been studied in some states, for example, in the Arizona Sentinel Investigation of all the vehicles which were stopped in the interstate highway in Florida, “While nearly 705 of […]
• Contemporary Cultural Diversity Issue: Racial Profiling The greatest weakness of this prejudicial consideration is the fact that even when there is no evidence to justify the case, the police treat an individual as a convict. Some of the states in America […]
• We Need More Racial Profiling At Airports
• Racial Profiling the War on Drugs and Urban Poverty
• An Analysis of the Problems of Stereotyping, Discrimination and Racial Profiling
• Racial Profiling: Individual Prejudice or Organizational Protocol
• The Problem of Racial Profiling in the American Criminal Justice System
• Retail Racial Profiling and False Accusation and Arrest for Shoplifting
• The Issue of Racial Profiling and the Problem with African Americans Overreacting
• The Link Between Racial Profiling and Social Diversity
• An Analysis of the Issue of Racial Profiling in the United States of America
• Windy City Racial Profiling Is An Act Of Discrimination
• The Issues of Police Brutality and Racial Profiling in the United States
• An Argument Against Racial Profiling By Police
• African Americans and Police Racial Profiling
• America Needs Racial Profiling Based Upon Ethnicity and National Origin
• Racial Profiling in of Mice and Men by Steinbeck
• The Dangers Of Racial Profiling And Police Brutality
• The Positive and Negative Effects of Racial Profiling
• Racial Profiling In The Criminal Justice System Stevenson University
• An Analysis of Racial Profiling by Ordinary Citizens on Everyday Basis in the United States
• Racism, Racial Profiling, And Discrimination On Behalf Of The Los Angeles
• The American Federal Government Should Take Steps against Racial Profiling
• The Controversial Issue of Racial Profiling: Does It Really Exist
• Stereotypes And Racial Profiling On Society ‘s Perception
• Unrecognized Ignorance in the Story of Racial Profiling in School
• Shoplifting, Racial Profiling, and False Accusation in Retail
• The Truth About Racial Profiling
• Black Criminal Stereotypes and Racial Profiling
• The Problem of Racial Profiling in the United States
• Racial Profiling Is Unnecessary in Law Enforcement
• An Argument Supporting the Use of Racial Profiling in America for the Security of the People
• Racial Profiling: The Discrimination in America Due to Race and Skin Tone
• Racial Profiling Is The Root Of Dysfunction
• Common Assessment: The Iron Triangle And Racial Profiling
• Racial Profiling in the War on Drugs: Common Sense or Institutional Racism
• Racial Profiling Violates the Constitution
• Victims of Terrorism, Hate Crimes & Racial Profiling
• Racial Profiling : The Great Unfinished Business Of America
• The Issues of Racial Profiling of Minority Motorists in America
• Racial Profiling Of Asians In America
• Racial Profiling is Institutionalized Racism
• Strategies on How the Government Can End Racial Profiling
• The Law Enforcement Strategy Called Racial Profiling and the Debates Related to It
• The Federal Government Should Put an End to Racial Profiling
• The Issue of Racial Profiling in Law Enforcement in the United States
• Should Racial Profiling Be Allowed As A Tool Of The Police
• American History: Racial Profiling and Bias in The Media
• The Elimination of Racial Profiling in the Context of Street Level Crime
• Racial Profiling Versus Criminal Profiling: Is There a Difference
• The History of Racism, Racial Profiling, and Unfair Laws in the United States
• Racial Profiling : The Civil Rights Leader And Former
• Does Contact Racial Profiling Lead to Aggressive Police Conduct?
• Does Racial Profiling Exist?
• How Is Racial Profiling Damaging Our Schools?
• How Does Racial Profiling Violate Civil Rights?
• Is Racial Profiling a Crime?
• How Does Racial Profiling Affect Society?
• Should Patients Undergo Racial Profiling?
• What Is a Good Research Question for Racial Profiling?
• What Is Meant by Racial Profiling?
• What Is an Example of Racial Profiling?
• Which United States Supreme Court Held That, in General, Racial Profiling Is Unconstitutional?
• Does the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office Engage in Racial Profiling?
• What Is Racial Profiling in a Sentence?
• Is a Racial Profiling a Recent Problem?
• What Is the Racial Profiling Quizlet?
• How Racial Profiling Led to the Death of Trayvon Martin?
• Racial Profiling: Who Gets It Worse When the Gavel Comes Down?
• What Is Racial Profiling Simple?
• Does Racial Profiling Serve Well?
• How Do You Determine Racial Profiling?
• What Is the Opposite of Racial Profiling?
• Are Racial Profiling and Police Discrimination an Issue?
• What Is the Legal Definition of Racial Profiling?
• Is Racial Profiling Ethical?
• Does Racial Profiling Occur?
• What Does the Constitution Say About Racial Profiling?
• Why Is Ending Racial Profiling Important?
• What Is the Difference Between Behavior Profiling and Racial Profiling?
• Racial Profiling: Individual Prejudice or Organizational Protocol?
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Experiences of discrimination among the Black and Indigenous populations in Canada, 2019

by Adam Cotter , Canadian Centre for Justice and Community Safety Statistics

Text box 1 Measuring discrimination in the General Social Survey on Victimization

Section 1: discrimination among canada’s black population, nearly half of black people in canada experienced discrimination in the past 5 years, discrimination more common among canadian-born visible minority population, black people more often experience discrimination in stores, banks, or restaurants, proportion of black people experiencing discrimination due to race or skin colour has nearly doubled since 2014, text box 2 self-reported criminal victimization that was motivated by hate, section 2: discrimination among first nations people, métis, and inuit, seven in ten lesbian, gay, or bisexual indigenous people experienced discrimination, one in five indigenous people who experienced discrimination said it was when dealing with police, increase in proportion of indigenous people who experienced discrimination in past 5 years, text box 3 experiences of discrimination among other population groups designated as visible minority, detailed data tables, survey description.

• According to the 2019 General Social Survey (GSS) on Canadians’ Safety, nearly half (46%) of Black people aged 15 years and older reported experiencing at least one form of discrimination in the past 5 years, compared to 16% of the non-Indigenous, non-visible minority population.
• Of all Black people, four in ten (41%) experienced discrimination based on their race or skin colour, about 15 times higher than the proportion among the non-Indigenous, non-visible minority population (3%).
• Experiences of discrimination were much more common among Canadian-born Black people (65% E ) than among Black immigrants (36%).
• Data from the GSS show that a considerably higher proportion of Black people experienced discrimination in 2019 than in 2014 (46% versus 28%).
• Discrimination was more common among the Indigenous population than among populations who are both non-Indigenous and non-visible minority (33% versus 16%). More specifically, 44% of First Nations people had experienced discrimination in the 5 years preceding the survey, as had 24% of Métis and 29% of Inuit.
• Among those who were discriminated against, 21% of Indigenous people and 16% E of Black people said it was when dealing with police, compared with 4% of non-Indigenous, non-visible minority people who experienced discrimination.
• Experiences of discrimination were more common among Indigenous people in 2019 (33%) than they were in 2014 (23%).

Both socially and legally, Canada is a multicultural country ( Canadian Multiculturalism Act ; Berry 2013 ; Hyman et al. 2011 ). As a policy, multiculturalism has many goals, including recognizing and promoting the cultural and racial diversity of Canadian society, while emphasizing that this is a fundamental characteristic of Canadian identity and heritage; promoting the full and equal participation of individuals and communities in the development of Canadian society and assisting in the elimination of barriers to participation; and ensuring that individuals receive equal treatment and equal protection under the law, while respecting and valuing their diversity, among several others ( Canadian Multiculturalism Act ).

Despite the emphasis on multiculturalism, differential treatment and differential opportunity can still pose problems in a diverse society, and experiences of discrimination can have negative consequences for individuals ( Berry 2013 ; Dion 2002 ). In Canada, discrimination on the basis of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability, or conviction for an offence which has been pardoned are formally prohibited by law ( Canadian Human Rights Act ).

The Canadian Human Rights Act is based on the underlying principle that all Canadians have the right to equal opportunity, regardless of these characteristics. In addition to federal legislation, each province and territory has their own human rights legislation as well. Furthermore, beyond the grounds specifically mentioned in law, Canadians may perceive discrimination on the basis of other factors, such as their language or physical appearance.

Discrimination or victimization based on individual characteristics that are visible parts of identity can also have broader ramifications beyond the individual who is targeted ( Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights 2018 ; Perry 2010 ). These incidents or experiences can also impact the wider community to which the victims or targets belong, thereby negatively impacting society more broadly.

Using data from the 2019 General Social Survey (GSS) on Canadians’ Safety (Victimization), this Juristat article examines experiences of discrimination in daily life, with a particular focus on the experiences of the Black and First Nations, Métis, and Inuit populations living in Canada. Throughout the report, findings are compared to those who identified as neither Indigenous nor a member of a population group designated as visible minority in the Employment Equity Act – that is, primarily, those who identified as White or Caucasian. Note 

This report was funded by Canadian Heritage, as part of the federal government’s Anti-Racism Strategy. In addition, it represents part of Statistics Canada’s ongoing commitment to publishing data that is disaggregated to the fullest extent possible.

Start of text box 1

In order to measure discrimination, the 2019 General Social Survey on Victimization asked respondents if, in the past 5 years, they had experienced discrimination or been treated unfairly by others in Canada because of their sex, ethnicity or culture, race or skin colour, physical appearance, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, physical or mental disability, language, or another reason. Those who said yes to one or more of these questions were considered to have experienced discrimination.

In addition, those who experienced discrimination for any reason were asked about certain situations in which the discrimination may have occurred: at a bank, store, or restaurant, while attending school or classes, in the work environment, when dealing with police, when dealing with the courts, when crossing the border into Canada, or in any other situation.

End of text box 1

The Black population living in Canada is diverse, and represents a population with varying backgrounds, ethnicities, experiences, and circumstances ( Statistics Canada 2019 ; Do 2020 ). According to the 2016 Census of Population, the Black population represents 3.5% of the overall Canadian population, and is expected to represent between 5.0% and 5.6% of the population by 2036 ( Statistics Canada 2019 ).

While about one in five (19%) Canadians 15 years of age and older had experienced some form of discrimination or unfair treatment in the five years preceding the 2019 GSS , this varied considerably between ethno-cultural groups. The prevalence of discrimination was almost three times higher among Black Note  people (46%) compared to non-Indigenous, non-visible minority people (16%; Table 1 ).

Half (49%) of Black women had experienced discrimination or unfair treatment in the past 5 years, as did more than four in ten (42%) Black men. Note  In contrast, 20% of women and 13% of men who were neither Indigenous nor visible minorities were discriminated against.

The higher prevalence of discrimination among the Black population was in large part due to elevated levels of discrimination perceived to be motivated by race or skin colour or ethnicity or culture (Chart 1). For instance, four in ten (41%) Black people experienced discrimination or unfair treatment based on their race or skin colour in the five years preceding the survey, a proportion about 15 times higher than that of non-Indigenous, non-visible minority people (3%). Discrimination based on ethnicity or culture was experienced by more than one in four (27%) Black people, compared with 2% among the non-Indigenous, non-visible minority population.

Chart 1 start

Chart 1 end

In addition to race and ethnicity, discrimination on the basis of religion and language were also more common among Black people than among non-Indigenous, non-visible minority people.

As there is considerable overlap between the reasons why individuals are discriminated against, it may be difficult to disentangle the motivation for an incident of discrimination or unfair treatment. However, other individual and intersectional characteristics can influence the likelihood of facing discrimination. For example, seven in ten (70% E ) Black people who had experienced discrimination in the past 5 years indicated that they had been discriminated against for more than one reason. In contrast, this was the case for 45% of non-Indigenous, non-visible minority people.

Beyond ethno-cultural groups, many other factors and characteristics can influence levels of discrimination. For example, among Black people, two-thirds (65% E ) of those who were born in Canada had experienced some kind of discrimination in the past 5 years, nearly twice the proportion as among Black immigrants (36%; Table 2 ). A similar pattern, though to a lesser degree, was seen among those belonging to other visible minority groups; 35% of those born in Canada and 24% of those who were immigrants experienced some form of discrimination. In contrast, among non-Indigenous, non-visible minority people, there was no significant difference in the prevalence of discrimination between those who were immigrants (17%) and those who were not (16%).

Discrimination was also more commonly experienced among the relatively younger population. More than half (53%) of Black people between the ages of 15 to 44 had experienced discrimination in the 5 years preceding the survey, compared to about one-third (31%) of Black people aged 45 years and older. Note 

In addition to varying levels of discrimination, there were differences in the context in which discrimination was experienced across ethno-cultural groups. For example, of those who experienced discrimination, Black (51% E ) people more often experienced discrimination in a store, bank, or restaurant than did non-Indigenous, non-visible minority people (28%; Table 1 ).

Experiences of discrimination when dealing with the police were much more common among Black people. Among those who were discriminated against, the proportion who said it occurred when dealing with the police was four times higher among Black people (16% E ) than non-Indigenous, non-visible minority people (4%). This difference is despite the fact that data from the GSS show Black people came into contact with police at similar levels as non-Indigenous, non-visible minority people ( Cotter 2022 ; Ibrahim 2020 ).

Though more specific information or context of the circumstances of discrimination are not measured by the GSS , discrimination or differential treatment of Black and Indigenous people by the police has been noted elsewhere. For instance, research suggests that Black people in Canada are overrepresented as subjects of police stops and searches ( Wortley and Owusu-Bempah 2011 ; Foster and Jacobs 2019 ; Ontario Human Rights Commission 2021 ).

There were no significant differences between the Black population and the non-Indigenous, non-visible minority population in terms of the proportion who experienced discrimination when attending school or classes, at work or when applying for a job or promotion, or when dealing with the courts.

The same questions Note  used to measure discrimination in the 2019 GSS on Victimization were also included in the 2014 GSS , which allows for an examination of experiences of self-reported discrimination over time. Note 

In 2019, the proportion of Black people who reported experiencing discrimination was well above what was reported in 2014 (46% versus 28%; Chart 2). The key driver for the increase was the proportion who perceived discrimination based on their race or skin colour, which was almost two times higher in 2019 (41%) than in 2014 (23%). This increase precedes many significant demonstrations and events throughout 2020, which served to highlight many high-profile instances of misconduct, discrimination, or unfair treatment based on race.

Chart 2 start

Chart 2 end

Of note, discrimination also increased among the non-Indigenous, non-visible minority population over this time, albeit to a lesser extent (from 12% in 2014 to 16% in 2019).

Start of text box 2

Race or ethnicity accounts for motivation in half of self-reported hate-related incidents

Some of the same factors that are behind experiences of discrimination and unfair treatment can also serve as motivations for incidents of criminal victimization. According to the 2019 General Social Survey (GSS), 3% of all criminal incidents were perceived by the victim to be motivated by hatred—representing approximately 223,000 incidents. Violent incidents were more commonly believed to be hate motivated (6%).

Of all incidents perceived to be motivated by hate, over half (54% E ) of respondents identified the offender’s hatred of the victim’s race or ethnicity as the motivation. Note  Other commonly perceived motivators included language (32% E ), sex (24% E ), disability (23% E ), and religion (19% E ). Note 

End of text box 2

One in three Indigenous people experienced discrimination in the past 5 years

One-third (33%) of Indigenous people experienced discrimination in the 5 years preceding the survey, more than double the proportion for non-Indigenous, non-visible minority (16%; Table 1 ). Similar proportions of Indigenous women (33%) and men (32%) experienced discrimination. In both cases, these were higher proportions than what was observed among non-Indigenous, non-visible minority women (20%) and men (13%).

More specifically, 44% of First Nations people had experienced discrimination in the 5 years preceding the survey, as had 24% of Métis and 29% of Inuit (Chart 3). Note  As was the case when looking at the overall Indigenous population, there were no statistically significant differences in the prevalence of discrimination between women and men among distinction groups.

Chart 3 start

Chart 3 end

Common reasons for the discrimination experienced by Indigenous people included ethnicity or culture (15%) and race or skin colour (14%). These proportions were approximately five times higher than among the non-Indigenous, non-visible minority population (2% and 3%, respectively).

In addition to race and ethnicity, Indigenous people were also more likely to perceive discrimination or unfair treatment due to their physical appearance (14%), physical or mental disability (7%), and religion (5%) than were non-Indigenous, non-visible minority people (5%, 2%, and 2%, respectively).

While discrimination was more prevalent among Indigenous people, experiences of discrimination were not uniformly felt among all Indigenous people. For instance, 70% E of sexual minority Note  Indigenous people had been discriminated against or treated unfairly in the five years preceding the survey, more than twice the proportion of heterosexual Indigenous people (30%; Table 2 ).

Close to half (46%) of Indigenous people with a disability experienced discrimination, a proportion that was roughly twice as high as both the non-Indigenous, non-visible minority population with a disability (24%) and among Indigenous people who did not have a disability (22%).

In addition to varying levels of discrimination, there were differences in the context in which discrimination was experienced across ethno-cultural groups. As was seen among the Black population, experiences of discrimination when dealing with the police were also more common among Indigenous people. Among those who were discriminated against, the proportion who said it occurred when dealing with the police was five times higher among Indigenous people (21%) than among non-Indigenous, non-visible minority people (4%).

Indigenous people were also more likely to have experienced discrimination in a bank, store, or restaurant, when compared to the non-Indigenous, non-visible minority population (42% versus 28%).

There were no significant differences between Indigenous people and non-Indigenous, non-visible minority people in terms of the proportion who experienced discrimination when attending school or classes, at work or when applying for a job or promotion, when crossing the border into Canada, or when dealing with the courts.

Compared to the most recent previous GSS cycle in 2014, a higher proportion of Indigenous people stated that they had experienced discrimination or unfair treatment in Canada in the past 5 years in 2019 (33% versus 23%). Note 

More specifically, a larger proportion of Indigenous people experienced discrimination based on their physical appearance in 2019 (14%) than in 2014 (8%; Chart 4). Discrimination on the basis of physical or mental disability was also more commonly perceived by Indigenous people in 2019 (7%) than it was in 2014 (3%).

Chart 4 start

Chart 4 end

Start of text box 3

In addition to the higher levels of discrimination experienced by Black and Indigenous people, when looking at other ethno-cultural groups designated as visible minorities in Canada, discrimination was also more prevalent among certain groups. Southeast Asian (39% E ), Arab (32% E ), Latin American (30% E ), and Chinese (29%) people more commonly experienced discrimination for any reason, relative to the non-Indigenous, non-visible minority population (Chart 5).

Chart 5 start

Chart 5 end

Among those belonging to a population group designated as a visible minority Note  , the most common motivations for discrimination or unfair treatment were race or skin colour (19%) and ethnicity or culture (17%). Close to three-quarters (72%) of visible minority people (excluding Black people) who experienced discrimination said that it was on the basis of multiple grounds included in the GSS on Victimization.

On the whole, 30% of women and 25% of men belonging to another group designated as visible minority reported experiencing discrimination in the past 5 years, a difference that was not statistically significant. In part owing to sample size, there were no statistically significant differences in terms of the proportion who experienced discrimination between women and men for any individual population group in 2019.

More than one in ten (12%) of those belonging to another group designated as a visible minority said that the discrimination they experienced was when crossing the border into Canada, six times higher than the proportion among non-Indigenous, non-visible minority people (2%).

Taken together, more than one-quarter (27%) of those belonging to population groups designated as visible minority (excluding Black people) experienced discrimination in 2019, marking an increase from 2014 (19%).

End of text box 3

Data from the General Social Survey on Victimization show that, relative to the non-Indigenous, non-visible minority population, Black and Indigenous people in Canada are more likely to face discrimination. This was particularly the case when it came to discrimination based on race, ethnicity, skin colour, or culture.

Not only were Black and Indigenous people more likely to report experiencing discrimination and unfair treatment in Canada than other population groups, the proportion who had faced such experiences has increased compared to 2014, when the General Social Survey on Victimization was last conducted.

The circumstances in which discrimination was faced also varied across population groups. Both Black and Indigenous people were far more likely to have experienced discrimination during an interaction with police, when compared to the non-Indigenous, non-visible minority population. In addition, discrimination in a store, bank, or restaurant was more commonly experienced by Black and Indigenous people.

Table 1 Discrimination in the past 5 years, by reason for discrimination and population group or Indigenous identity, Canada, 2019

Table 2 Discrimination in the past 5 years, by population group or Indigenous identity and selected characteristics, Canada, 2019

General Social Survey on Victimization

In 2019, Statistics Canada conducted the General Social Survey on Victimization for the seventh time. Previous cycles were conducted in 1988, 1993, 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014. The main objective of the GSS on Victimization is to better understand issues related to the safety and security of Canadians, including perceptions of crime and the justice system, experiences of intimate partner violence, and how safe people feel in their communities. The target population was persons aged 15 and older living in the provinces and territories, except for those living full-time in institutions.

Data collection took place between April 2019 and March 2020. Responses were obtained by computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI), in-person interviews (in the territories only) and, for the first time, the GSS on Victimization offered a self-administered internet collection option to survey respondents in the provinces and in the territorial capitals. Respondents were able to respond in the official language of their choice.

The sample size for the GSS on Victimization was 22,412 respondents, with a response rate of 37.6%. Respondents in the sample were weighted so that their responses represent the non-institutionalized Canadian population aged 15 and older.

Data limitations

With any household survey, there are some data limitations. The results are based on a sample and are therefore subject to sampling errors. Somewhat different results might have been obtained if the entire population had been surveyed.

For the quality of estimates the lower and upper bounds of the confidence intervals are presented. Confidence intervals should be interpreted as follows: if the survey were repeated many times, then 95% of the time (or 19 times out of 20), the confidence interval would cover the true population value.

Berry, J.W. 2013. Research on multiculturalism in Canada. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 37 , 663-675.

Canadian Human Rights Act. R.S.C., 1985, c. H-6.

Canadian Multiculturalism Act. R.S.C. 1985, c. 24 (4 th Supp.)

Cotter, A. 2022. "Perceptions of and experiences with police and the justice system among the Black and Indigenous populations in Canada.” Juristat . Statistics Canada Catalogue no.  85-002-X.

Dion, K.L. 2002. The social psychology of perceived prejudice and discrimination. Canadian Psychology, 43 (1), 1-10.

Do, D. 2020. Canada’s Black population: Education, labour and resilience. Ethnicity, Language and Immigration Thematic Series. Statistics Canada Catalogue no.  89-657-X2020002.

Foster, L. and Jacobs, L. 2019. Traffic Stop Race Data Collection Project II Progressing towards bias-free policing: Five years of race data on traffic stops in Ottawa . Accessed Dec 21.

Hyman, I., Meinhard, A., and Shields, J. 2011. The role of multiculturalism policy in addressing social inclusion processes in Canada. Working paper series, vol.  2011 (3).

Ibrahim, D. 2020. “Public perceptions of the police in Canada’s provinces, 2019.” Juristat . Statistics Canada Catalogue no.  85-002-X.

Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. 2018. Prosecuting Hate Crimes: A Practical Guide.

Ontario Human Rights Commission. 2021. Framework for change to address systemic racism in policing.

Perry, B. 2010. “Policing hate crime in a Multicultural society observations from Canada.” International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice . Vol.  38. p.  120 to 140.

Statistics Canada. 2019. Diversity of the Black population in Canada: An Overview. Statistics Canada Catalogue no.  89-657. Ottawa: Statistics Canada.

Wortley, S. and Owusu-Bempah, A. 2011. The usual suspects: Police stop and search practices in Canada. Policing and Society, 21 (4), 395-407.

More information

Note of appreciation.

Canada owes the success of its statistical system to a long-standing partnership between Statistics Canada, the citizens of Canada, its businesses, governments and other institutions. Accurate and timely statistical information could not be produced without their continued co-operation and goodwill.

Standards of service to the public

Statistics Canada is committed to serving its clients in a prompt, reliable and courteous manner. To this end, the Agency has developed standards of service which its employees observe in serving its clients.

Published by authority of the Minister responsible for Statistics Canada.

© His Majesty the King in Right of Canada as represented by the Minister of Industry, 2022

Use of this publication is governed by the Statistics Canada Open Licence Agreement .

Catalogue no. 85-002-X

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Racial Profiling — Pros and Cons of Racial Profiling

Pros and Cons of Racial Profiling

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Published: Mar 20, 2024

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Pros of racial profiling, cons of racial profiling, impact on society.

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