Argumentative Essay: The Issue Of Racial Profiling

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Racial profiling is a strategy of stopping a citizen because of their color of his or her skin, and fleeting suspicion that the person is conspiring in criminal behavior. This application can be managed with routine traffic stops, or can be entirely random based upon the car that is being driven, or the amount of people in the car and the ethnicity of the driver and the passengers aboard. Racial profiling has been apart of the law enforcement system for a long time now, and it is nothing that has not been seen. The only reason why people hear more about this topic is due to the use of media, and how it has brought this controversial topic to the public eye a lot more than in the past. The question that has so much controversy, is racial profiling just or bad, and does it actually have an effect on the way law enforcement fight crime. Racial profiling can be put into two meanings, rigid profiling and light profiling. A case of hard profiling would be if an officer sees an African American person, pulls him over for a frisking on the chance that he may be carrying illegal substances or a weapon. Soft profiling would be a case such as, when the state police get a clue that a certain demographic is trafficking drugs down a specific highway, and drive a certain type of car, and from this tip the troopers pull over a person matching the stereotype in a hope to find drugs and the criminals at hand. The racial profiling debate centers primarily on highway halts. The police are pulling over a disproportionate percentage of minority motorists for traffic offenses in hopes of looking for drugs. The driver may have been driving costly, but the reason why the officer pulled over that person, and not the car next to them, might have to do with the color of their skin. Highway stops should always be colorless, unless the officer has tips to go on to make that stop. The DEA teaches state officials some common identifying signs of drugs traffickers. Anxiety was the number one trait identified, with other indicators such as, no bags for a long trip, lots of money, lack of a driver’s license or car insurance, a spare tire in the back seat, and a license plate from well known drug state. Racial profiling is a big issue, not only because of the damage it does to American society, but also due to the connections between stops of minority drivers and the majority, bigger issues of criminal injustice and race. Putting it a different manner, "driving while black" reflects some of the big problems African American people face today when people debate issues involving racial demographics,law enforcement, and the justice system, punishments, crime containment, criminal injustices, and constitutional amendments. The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution forbids unjustified searches And seizures on citizens, and specifically addresses some of the requirements to be met in order to acquire a warrant to search citizens and their property. The definition, across the board ranges from including race and nationality as a deliberation, when debating to apply law enforcement procedures, to using race, ethnicity, or nationality as the only consideration. A similar term called racially-biased policing, and the line between what neighborhoods find just and unjust is influenced by a wide range of elements (Anderson & Callahan, 2001). The public recognition of the influence of racial profiling varies under different situations. For example, a ballot conducted in 1999 said, 81% of people that reported that …show more content…
In April 2010, Arizona enacted SB 1070, which made it a misdemeanor crime for an illegal of the United States to be in Arizona without carrying the required documentation. The act also allowed law enforcement to determine an individual’s immigration status while a lawful stop or arrest is taking place (Archibold, 2010). The act, which was written solely to address Arizona’s rise in illegal immigrants, was the strictest and most controversial anti-illegal immigration legislation of the time and prompted debate nationwide regarding the potential for racial profiling. The Supreme Court upheld the requirement in 2012, and five other states (Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Utah, and South Carolina) adopted similar laws (Billeaud & Berry,

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