Racial Profiling


The Truth About Racial Profiling: Seven Facts

Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) defines racial profiling as the targeting of individuals and groups by law enforcement officials, even partially, on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion, except when there is trustworthy information, relevant to the locality and timeframe, that links persons belonging to one of the aforementioned groups to an identified criminal incident or scheme. As documented in the AIUSA report Threat and Humiliation: Racial Profiling, National Security, and Human Rights in the United States, the U.S. continues to use race, color, ethnicity, national origin and religion as a proxy for criminal suspicion, in violation of international treaties to which it is party. The clear alternative is for law enforcement to focus on actual criminal behavior rather than characteristics such as race, religion, ethnicity, or nationality.
  1. A staggering number of people in the United States are subjected to racial profiling. Approximately 32 million people, a number approximately equivalent to the population of Canada, report they have already been victims of racial profiling. Victims of racial profiling include Native Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, African Americans, Arab Americans, Iranian Americans, American Muslims, many immigrants and visitors, and under certain circumstances, white Americans.
Cathy Harris
Cathy Harris exposed practices of racial profiling at the US Customs Service
  1. Racial profiling can sometimes have devastating and deadly consequences. Victims of racial profiling are sometimes further victimized by acts of police violence and brutality. This is illustrated by numerous reports AIUSA received, including the case of Santiago described in the report Threat and Humiliation. Santiago, an epileptic black man who wore dreadlocks, was killed because police automatically assumed that a black man seizing on the floor must be on drugs. Officers reportedly threw him on the ground, placed a knee on his back and caused him to stop breathing. He was given oxygen, gained consciousness for a short while, was handcuffed and taken to the hospital where he died.
  2. Racial profiling undermines law enforcement efforts. Racial profiling has reportedly undermined important terrorist investigations in the U.S., including the Oklahoma City bombing in which the white male assailant, Timothy McVeigh, was able to flee while officers reportedly operated on the theory that "Arab terrorists" had committed the act. Similarly, during the Washington, DC-area sniper investigation, the African-American man and boy who were ultimately convicted for the crimes were able to pass through multiple road blocks with the alleged murder weapon in their possession, in part because police profilers theorized the crime had been committed by a white male assailant.
  3. Racial profiling is a proven failure in the 'War on Drugs.' Statistics show that using racial profiling to interdict highway-bound drug couriers is not just wrong, but ineffective. A survey by the Department of Justice in 1999 reveled that while officers disproportionately focused on African American and Latino drivers, they found drugs more often when they searched whites (17%) than when they searched African Americans (8%). A similar survey in New Jersey found that although people of color were searched more frequently, state troopers found drugs in vehicles driven by whites 25% of the time, by African Americans 13%, and by Latinos 5%. According to a study of the US Customs Service's practice by Lamberth Consulting, when Customs agents stopped using racial profiling to target potential smugglers and began focusing on race-neutral factors such as behavior, they increased the rate of productive searches by more than 300%.
  4. Racial profiling has not worked in the 'War on Terror.' Racial profiling gives terror networks a formula for greater success by tipping them off about who needs to be recruited in order to be more successful. This is illustrated by the experience in World War II when–despite the massive internments of Japanese Americans and visitors–none of the people convicted of spying for Japan were of Japanese or Asian ancestry. Moreover, the arrests of John Walker Lindh (a white, middle-class male) and Richard Reid (a British citizen of West Indian ancestry) confirm that effective law enforcement techniques must rely solely on behavior and not race or nationality in order to ensure security.
  5. Racial profiling is a human rights violation. Racial profiling violates international standards against non-discrimination and multiple treaties to which the U.S. is party, including the UN Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
  6. The administration has not kept its promise to end racial profiling. Both President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft are on record opposing racial profiling. Just after the September 11th attacks, the Attorney General repeated his promise. However, since then, the administration has allowed important anti-racial profiling legislation to languish, and has yet to act on the recently introduced End Racial Profiling Act of 2004. At the same time, the administration has expanded the use of racial profiling in immigration and law enforcement policies. Furthermore, the 2003 Guidance Regarding the Use of Race by Federal Law Enforcement Agencies contains several flaws, including a "national security" exception for the use of race, a lack of enforcement mechanisms, and no mandate for data collection on law enforcement practices