essay on racial profiling

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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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

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Solving racial disparities in policing

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“ 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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U.S. Officials Order Better Tracking of a Political Flashpoint: America’s Diversity

New survey questions in federal forms will draw a more detailed portrait of racial and ethnic origins. Officials point to the benefits, but the changes could face a conservative backlash.

By Michael Wines

The Biden administration ordered changes to a range of federal surveys on Thursday to gather more detailed information about the nation’s ethnic and racial makeup.

The changes — the first in decades to standard questions that the government asks about race and ethnicity — would produce by far the most detailed portrait of the nation’s ancestral palette ever compiled. And a new option will be available for the first time allowing respondents to identify as part of a new category, Middle Eastern or North African ancestry.

But the changes also have the potential to rankle conservatives who believe that the nation’s focus on diversity has already gone too far.

No Box to Check: When the Census Doesn’t Reflect You

Most people of Middle Eastern and North African descent are classified as “white” in U.S. census data. Thousands of respondents to a Times survey told us how they actually identify.

The revisions, released after 21 months of study and public comment, apply not just to the Census Bureau, but across the government, to forms as varied as the National Center for Health Statistics’ National Health Interview Survey and applications for Social Security cards. They take effect this month, but federal agencies will be allowed years to fully implement them.

Current surveys contain a separate option for people of ethnic Hispanic and Latino descent to claim that identity, followed by another question that offers multiple options for respondents to choose one or more races.

The changes consolidate those questions so that respondents may select any or all of seven racial and ethnicity categories that apply to them, including Hispanic or Latino ancestry.

Those seven choices would also include the new option allowing respondents to register Middle Eastern or North African ancestry. The Census Bureau estimates that about 3.5 million people fall into that category, all of whom are currently classified as white. But many do not see themselves that way, as an informal survey by The New York Times of about 5,300 U.S. residents with that heritage showed last month.

Even after selecting racial and ethnic identities, respondents would be able to dive deeply into their own backgrounds, choosing as many or as few sub-classifications as they liked from suggested nationalities, like German or Lebanese. People who found those insufficient would be able to write in still other nationalities or ethnicities.

American censuses have gathered personal information since the 1790s, but since 1977, surveys have specifically tracked basic race and ethnicity characteristics, originally to help enforce 1960s-era civil- and voting-rights laws. Save for one modification in 1997, the questions have remained largely unchanged until now.

Officials of the Office of Management and Budget, which oversaw the review of the current survey questions, said the changes were needed in part to make surveys more accurate. For example, respondents who separately identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino in the current surveys frequently overlooked choosing a racial identification in the questions that followed, something that may happen less often when all questions are consolidated in a single section.

The changes also are also expected to allow experts to better measure how various populations benefit from federal programs and services in areas like employment, health and education, they said.

An American Puzzle: Fitting Race in a Box

Census categories for race and ethnicity have shaped how the nation sees itself. Here’s how they have changed over the last 230 years.

The new questions build in part on the 2020 census, which gave white and African American respondents an option for the first time to write in additional ancestral information should they choose. To experts’ surprise, the number of respondents who were identified as having more than one race was second only to the number who identified as white.

When the Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee reviewed a draft of the latest changes in March 2023 , one demographer, Rogelio Sáenz of the University of Texas at San Antonio, called the 2020 results “a wake-up call about what is going on in terms of the increasing racial and ethnic diversity of our nation’s population.”

“Our world has changed tremendously with respect to racial and ethnic matters,” he said. “And at the same time, our methodologies, our instruments have remained quite stable.”

Others say, however, that the ever-finer sorting of people into racial and ethnic silos will only further fragment a deeply split nation.

“Classification of people according to a completely arbitrary standard just creates anxiety, animosity, and division,” one of the more than 20,000 public comments on the 2023 draft proposal stated. “It divides the people, and the nation. It is time to stop it, rather than expand it even further.”

Wrote another: “The more we reinforce our self-defined divisions, the less likely we are to work together. Stop. Just stop.”

The changes hardly come at the spur of the moment. Experts have studied them since the middle of the last decade, and beyond the thousands of public comments, the Office of Management and Budget consulted 35 other federal agencies and a host of sociologists and demographers, among others, for advice.

Those who broadly support the new questions — academics, civil liberties advocates and racial and ethnic interest groups among them — say they would promote greater fairness in schools, housing, hiring and other aspects of society where census data is used.

Arab Americans, in particular, have lobbied for years to be recognized in federal surveys and have pushed hard for the adoption of the new classification for people of Middle Eastern and North African origin. Among other things, advocates say, data from the new category would help in prosecuting hate crimes and civil-rights violations against Arab Americans.

“We know that these groups experience voter suppression, discriminatory policing, inequitable access to government programs and services,” one supporter of the new category wrote in a public comment last year. “But they cannot tell the stories because these groups are considered as ‘White.’”

Critics note, however, that the proposed category for Middle Eastern and North African residents is not an ethnic or racial construct, but a geographic one that includes non-Arab nations like Israel and Iran, and ancestries like Kurdish.

“We’re creating a category for MENA” — the acronym for Middle Eastern and North African — “and making Hispanic effectively a race,” Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said in an interview. “We’re creating categories for grievance mongering. We need less of this in America, not more.”

One indicator of the fraught politics surrounding the survey questions: The Obama administration considered a proposal in 2016 that was similar to the one approved on Thursday, only to see it die a quick death in 2017 after Donald J. Trump took the White House. Mr. Gonzalez, the author of a book on identity politics, was one of the leaders of a conservative campaign against that proposal.

Margo Anderson , a professor emerita of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the author of a comprehensive history of the census , suggested in a recent paper that the Biden administration send the proposal back for more study instead of pushing for its adoption. “I worry that it’s going to be hard to make sensible statistical policy during a presidential election year,” she said in an interview.

Mr. Gonzalez said the new survey questions were likely to face opposition from any future Republican White House. “It’s a long time between now and 2030, a very long time away,” he said, referring to the date of the next decennial census. “I’m just going to leave it there.”

Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

Michael Wines is a national correspondent, writing about voting and election issues. He is based in Washington, D.C. More about Michael Wines

Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Racial Profiling — Racial Profiling’s Impact on Community-Police Relations

Racial Profiling's Impact on Community-police Relations

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Published: Mar 25, 2024

Words: 557 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Table of contents

Introduction:, historical background:, underlying causes:, effects on community-police relations:, legal and ethical implications:, mitigating strategies:, conclusion:.

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