Police Response to Racial Profiling: You Can't Win

• NCJ Number: 207424
• Journal: Illinois Law Enforcement Executive Forum Dated: July 2001 Pages: 1-13
• Author(s): Larry T. Hoover Ph.D.
• Editor(s): Thomas J. Jurkanin Ph.D.
• Date Published: July 2001
• Length: 13 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Special edition on racial profiling; for additional articles see NCJ-207425-434.

Annotation

This article addresses law enforcement practices and racial profiling specifically the dilemma faced by law enforcement in utilizing race as a profile characteristic in response to general enforcement, such as traffic stops.

Abstract

The practice of discriminatory enforcement has been a long-standing issue in American law enforcement with allegations that law enforcement agencies are employing race as a criterion for presumptive traffic stops. This article examines two issues related to racial profiling: the ambiguity in the definition of racial profiling and the deployment of officers based on specific traffic stop data. Biased enforcement is not immediately recognizable and the definition is not universally agreed upon. For law enforcement, profiling is viewed as a legitimate police practice. The issue is not whether the police should use personal characteristics as probability indicators of involvement in a criminal offense or even a pattern of criminal offenses, but whether race may be used as one of those characteristics for nonspecific general enforcement. An emerging opinion is that race, as a profile characteristic should be used only in the rarest of circumstances. However, in examining police deployment and traffic stop data, police officers are deployed proportional to demand with more officers placed in neighborhoods that generate a higher proportion of calls for service. By placing more police officers in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, there will be more traffic stops made. This factor causes the statistics to reflect substantial disproportionate stops of minorities which supports the assertion that deployment patterns significantly impact the racial proportion of traffic stops. Some interpretations of the data can lead to accusations of improper behavior by law enforcement, but if police administrators resist gathering the data, they are assumed to be hiding improper behavior.