Racial Profiling Literature Review

In a research article by Tomaskovic-Devey and Warren (2009), the writers attribute the practice of racial profiling to organizational practices and from individual prejudices and racists attitudes held by its practitioners (p. 35). Tomaskovic-Devey and Warren illustrate the organizational scope of racial profiling by examining the Drug Enforcement Administration’s 1984 initiative Operation Pipeline. The initiative trained approximately 25,000 state and local police officers how to identity possible drug couriers (Tomaskovic-Devey and Warren, 2009). Race played a significant role in this training and oftentimes minorities were the subject of these stops, other law enforcement entities around the country used the identifiers established by the DEA to craft similar identifiers, with being a major and often primary factor used to identify drug suspected drug couriers. Throughout this literature and other bodies of research on the subject matter one of the overarching consensus is that although minorities are stopped and searched more than Whites, the likelihood of recovering contraband is higher from Whites than minorities. Efficiency and effective is important in …show more content…
The authors advocate that because a demographic may be responsible for most crime, identifying and investigating those in that demographic does not constitute racial profile, but is a legitimate method of crime control. In their study of the Louisville, KY Police Department these authors discovered something conversely different from most of the other research in the field. Through their research, Vito and Walsh found that minority drivers were more likely to be warned while it was more probable that Whites would be ticketed or arrested. Therefore, while African-Americans were more likely to be stopped, Whites were more likely to be the target of official police action. (p.