Racial Profiling And The Right For Police Officers

We all come from a particular ethnic background. It is what makes us unique; it helps identify ourselves amongst the billions of people in the world. However, does the previous history of your race or ethnicity grant the right for police officers to profile you? That question is countlessly being debated amongst American citizens and even top government officials. Racial profiling is a subject that has stirred up so much controversy in the past that it still hasn t been fully resolved to this day. To put into historical context, periods of American history as the Jim Crow era, segregated colored people by regarding them as second-class citizens and restricted them from access to specific public facilities. The justification of racial†¦show more content†¦He says, Numerous studies, data collection, and individual anecdotes confirm that law enforcement agents continue to rely on race, color or national or ethnic origin as a basis for subjecting people to criminal investigation s,(Parker). He argues that correlating suspicious criminal activity mainly off an ethnicity is retroactive in a proactive society. What Parker means is that as a country, we should be trying to move forward, yet we are still stuck debating on a concept that should be fairly straightforward morally. On the other hand, Heather Mac Donald, an esteemed American political commentator from the Manhattan Institute argues that the ground of racial profiling is proactive policing. Mac Donald believes that there is no credible evidence that profiling is a disastrous problem within the police department. She backs up her claim by emphasizing that most complaints of racial profiling come from the ethnicities where crime is the most abundant. Given the racial disparities in crime commission, the police cannot provide protection to neighborhoods that most need it without generating racially disproportionate enforcement, (Mac Donald), says Mac Donald. Parker and Mac Donald take a very different approach to racial profiling, but their major concerns may be closer than it initially appears. They can find common ground in their quest to see crime rates and citizen discomfort decrease. Both sides can find a middle