Racial_Profiling_Essay

Furthermore, not only is racial profiling ineffective at stopping crime and terror, it also amplifies the troubles it attempts to alleviate as it promotes racial superiority and adds to stereotypes that serve as racial dividers. For instance, “teaching younger generations that it is acceptable to judge a someone based upon the color of their skin, because certain races commit more crimes and have more ‘criminal genes,’” (The Oracle) would reinforce racism and promote racial violence. It makes it more likely for racial violence to escalate as it causes acts of hatred and intolerance stemming from the mentality that a certain race is inferior. Additionally, “racial profiling also prevents the communities help catch criminals as it tends to alienate them, especially those of black or Latino descent where the police themselves are seen as enemies” (About). Unlike racial profiling, community policing, such as reporting suspicious activity and being corporative witnesses is shown to work effectively and by diminishing the ability of authorities to communicate effectively with the communities that the criminals reside in, racial profiling hampers the justice processes even more. Racial profiling also serves to weaken our ability to catch terrorists such as Umar Abdul Mutallab who was Nigerian, and Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, who was British. Most notably, these examples include the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in which the two white male domestic terrorists, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, were able to flee while officers operated on the theory that the act had been committed by "Arab terrorists" for the first 48 hours of the investigation” (CNN). By doing away with racial profiling, the US would be able to better use its resources to catch criminals and terrorists through better attested and verified methods, and be more effective. Overall, the US should do away with racial profiling as it creates more detrimental effects than it seeks to solve. In the end, racial profiling is simply another name for state-sponsored bigotry, racial and ethnic profiling that changes the mindset to think that a certain race is more likely to commit a crime, discarding individual differences and characteristics. The use of profiling by race runs against what the very values the United States was founded for and is completely untested. Without racial profiling, the US would be a better place without more racial discrimination and violence. After all, it would be truly ironic for American citizens to lose their rights in the name of freedom.