There have been many incidents where people have been stopped and mistaken for a criminal because of the fact that they “fit the profile”. Being a person of color in America can put them at a disadvantage in many ways because of how the United States was unconsciously built upon a racial hierarchy and the notion of white supremacy. It is no doubt that white supremacy has had some responsibility in racial exploitation of minority groups in America. One common mistreatment of ethnic/minority groups that bring up a heated debate is Racial Profiling, which many may define as the idea of using a person’s race, or skin pigmentation by law enforcements to either engage in enforcement or not. Issue five of Taking Sides: Clashing Views in Crime and Criminology dives into the controversial topic of racial profiling and whether it’s an acceptable form to use in law enforcement. In reality, can race stand alone in predicting behaviors?
Researchers, Jared Taylor and Glayde Whitney argue that law enforcements are justified in using racial profiling as a strategy to catch criminals. They use the macro level crime data to justify this claim, and through the statistics, found a correlation between different levels of violent crime among African Americans, Hispanics, and less of a correlation involving Americans and Asians. Michael Lynch on the other hand, interprets the crime data in a different way and criticizes Taylor and Whitney’s misinterpretation of the analysis on crime and victimization data. While Lynch agrees on the fact that African Americans are overrepresented in crime data, he argues that this could be a result of bias in law enforcement to purposely select them for official processing in the criminal system. In “Misleading Evidence and the Misguided Attempt to Generate Racial Profiling of Criminals; Correcting Fallacies and Calculations Concerning Race, and Crime, in Taylor and Whitney’s Analysis of Racial Profiling”, L...