Racial Profiling and the Presumption of Innocence
Why exactly racial profiling is wrong can be articulated in a number of ways. Some criticisms of racial profiling claim that it simply does not work. Against the defense of racial profiling as a rational way to focus limited law enforcement resources based on statistical data that purportedly links race and criminal offending, these critics empirically demonstrate both that the use of race as a proxy for criminality has a poor track record in producing evidence of criminal wrongdoing and that skepticism regarding its contributions to crime prevention is warranted.1 Others focus on the harmful effects of racial profiling, such as imposing psychological trauma on the profiled individual, increasing contacts of profiled groups with the criminal justice system, reducing the profiled group’s personal mobility, increasing tensions between police and profiled communities, undermining the perceived legitimacy of the legal system, and other collateral costs of these more direct consequences.2 Lastly, others argue that racial profiling is not merely wrong because of these consequentialist failings, but also because it violates basic constitutional rights, such as the right to be protected against unreasonable searches and seizures and the right to equal protection of the law.3