Profiles in Injustice:
Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work
by David Harris

"When we talk about fighting crime in the United States," writes University of Toledo College of Law professor David A. Harris and author of Profiles in Injustice,"we often find ourselves using military metaphors, as in the 'war on drugs.'"

Racial profiling, as Harris explains, has played a key role in a war in which human casualties—particularly Americans whose skin tones range from brown to black—are perfectly acceptable.

But in Profiles in Injustice, Harris' statistical and anecdotal analysis reveals that racial profiling is a horribly flawed law enforcement practice which favors ethnic identifiers as a basis for traffic stops and searches—over the more sophisticated practice of behavior-based criminal profiling.

When Harris analyzes the available data on racial profiling, he finds that the "hit rate"—the rate at which police find drugs or other contraband on people they stop using racial profiling—is actually lower for African Americans and Latinos than for Euro-Americans, despite the fact that Department of Justice data reveals that African American and Latino drivers are twice as likely to be stopped by police than Euro-American drivers.

Nor is Harris is content to simply assign blame for the practice of racial profiling on rogue, racist cops: "If both black and white officers seem to use traffic stops and searches disproportionately against blacks and other minorities, this implies that profiling is about more than the racism of a few racist whites with badges. Rather it is an institutional problem, and an institutional practice, that lies at the base of this thorny knot of difficulties," he writes. "[P]rofiling is about pervasive police and investigative strategies based on biases found throughout our society, to the great detriment of those who find themselves on the wrong end of police suspicion when they have done nothing wrong."

Without meaningful, substantial changes to the practice of racial profiling, Harris stresses that law enforcement agencies will continue to unfairly (and abusively) target innocent teens and adults whose facial features and skin tones have, in effect, been "criminalized."

"When we use race as a way to predict who might be a criminal, because we believe the statistics bear this out, a funny thing happens," Harris concludes. "The prophecy is fulfilled; the theory works. We arrest more blacks and Latinos, convict more blacks and Latinos, and jail more blacks and Latinos. As we go round and round this circle, we never notice facts that lie just outside our vision. And we never ask ourselves questions—because we have the answers we need already."

Book review by Silja J.A. Talvi
08.24.02

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