Argumentative Essay: The Issue Of Racial Profiling

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 …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,