What Constitutes Racial Profiling?
Whether you’re driving or even just walking down a sidewalk, the threat of racial profiling can create significant anxiety.
Sometimes, it’s not even just racial profiling that might happen. For example, studies have found that law enforcement might target someone because they’re riding a motorcycle, even if they comply with laws or they’re in a particular type of vehicle.
There are many gray areas when it comes to profiling and sometimes it can be confusing to know what does and doesn’t fall into this category. Racial profiling happens to many different racial and ethnic groups, including Arab Americans. In particular, Arab Americans are often profiled as terrorists and are commonly grouped into the same category as anyone from the general “Middle East” region no matter their true background. It is important to understand if you are the victim of profiling or if you may be unintentionally profiling someone yourself.
The following are some of the core things to know about racial profiling, its prevalence, and what can be done.
What is Profiling?
We often talk about profiling as if it’s always intentional. What’s important to understand is that we all do some form of profiling everyday in our interactions with other people, but individuals in certain positions have to be especially mindful of the potential for profiling to happen.
For law enforcement and security officials, it can take unlearning certain things or mindfulness at all times to overcome tendencies that could lead them to racially profile the people they interact with.
Racial profiling is a practice of discrimination where someone targets a person for suspicion of a crime based only on religion, national origin, ethnicity, or race. Racial profiling can occur when law enforcement uses a set of characteristics to make decisions that they believe are associated with crime.
For example, if race is used as a justification to get drivers to stop for seemingly minor traffic violations, that can become profiling.
Using race or religion as a way to determine which pedestrians to search for something like illegal weapons can also be racial profiling.
Along with law enforcement officials who are policing, profiling can be done by private security officers, airline pilots or employees, and people who work in airline security.
Profiling is not when someone pursues a suspect based on a specific description of them, including their ethnicity or race.
Instead, racial profiling means that law enforcement or a security official is solely using race, national origin, religion or ethnicity, although some have an issue with this description as well. The solely part of the definition, according to some could still allow for a lot of the racial profiling people experience.
Data gathered by the Stanford Open Policing Project looked at almost 100 million traffic stops in 21 states from 2011 to 2017. It found that police did stop and search Latino and black drivers based on less evidence than they used to stop white drivers. White drivers, based on that data, were searched less often but were more likely to be found with illegal items.
The study did not make a conclusion or determination as to whether officers were knowingly engaging in discrimination. Instead, the goal of the research was to use traffic stop data to infer that race could be a factor when people are pulled over on America’s roadways.
To sum it up as briefly as possible, racial profiling means that officers or security officials target people for their race instead of behavior indicating they’re engaged in illegal activity.
What Can You Do?
An important thing you can do to be proactive against profiling in your own life is to know your rights. When you understand your fundamental civil rights, it can help you know the best steps to take in certain situations.
For example, as you may have heard quite a bit, it is true that you have the right to remain silent under the Fifth Amendment. You also have a right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures under the Fourth Amendment. This means that law enforcement and government agents can’t legally search your home or office without a search warrant or your consent.
Are There Legal Options If You Believe You’ve Been a Victim of Profiling?
In most cases, if we’re talking about driving or being on the roadways in some capacity, if you did something wrong, it’s going to be difficult to show any profiling occurred. However, there are civil actions that you can take in some situations.
If you believe that you’re a victim of racial profiling, you might be able to file an individual lawsuit at the federal level.
An individual lawsuit is often referred to as a section 1983 suit. It’s a civil action that might allow you to sue for a violation of your civil rights. There’s also a federal statute, section 1981. This statute prohibits racial discrimination by a government official.
It’s difficult to win in these types of lawsuits, though.
Under federal law, the U.S. Department of Justice can bring lawsuits against the police if they believe they engaged in something unconstitutional.
If you think you’re a victim, you can also potentially find some relief in the form of a state civil rights case, but only a couple of states have civil remedies that are specific to racial profiling.
You can file what’s called a Driver Profiling Complaint Form with the ACLU. While the organization can’t guarantee any specific action will be taken, they might use the information for different purposes.
Finally, if you believe that you’re profiled at the airport, there are some things you can do too.
First, you should submit a complaint to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Air Consumer Protection Division. Then, the DOT will investigate the complaint, and you should receive a response from the airline. If the DOT finds through the course of their investigation that a policy or procedure has violated a law or guideline, they’ll take corrective action against the airline.
For the most part, whether you’re driving, you’re a pedestrian or you’re flying, you must know your rights in any given situation. This isn’t just to protect against profiling, but it helps you know the appropriate way to deal with a complex scenario that you might face. You can worry about handling the legal component including any available civil remedies once you’re out of the immediate situation.
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