Racial Profiling: Alive, Well & Deadly

Nov 29

“Many racial profiling victims walk away with traffic tickets, but too often for others the outcome of racial profiling is death.” (ACLU)

We read tweets today from R&B singer Ari Lennox who was arrested in Amsterdam yesterday after she said she responded to racial profiling from a security agent at the airport.

While the security has claimed other reasons for the arrest, we know all too well how racial profiling has permeated every layer of society, and how even fame is not enough to protect many BIPOC from the insidiousness of this form of racism.

ACLU defines racial profiling as:

“refers to the discriminatory practice by law enforcement officials of targeting individuals for suspicion of crime based on the individual's race, ethnicity, religion or national origin. Criminal profiling, generally, as practiced by police, is the reliance on a group of characteristics they believe to be associated with crime. Examples of racial profiling are the use of race to determine which drivers to stop for minor traffic violations (commonly referred to as "driving while black or brown"), or the use of race to determine which pedestrians to search for illegal contraband.

Another example of racial profiling is the targeting, ongoing since the September 11th attacks, of Arabs, Muslims and South Asians for detention on minor immigrant violations in the absence of any connection to the attacks on the World Trade Center or the Pentagon.

Law enforcement agent includes a person acting in a policing capacity for public or private purposes. This includes security guards at department stores, airport security agents, police officers, or, more recently, airline pilots who have ordered passengers to disembark from flights, because the passengers' ethnicity aroused the pilots' suspicions. Members of each of these occupations have been accused of racial profiling.”

Additionally, ACLU shares a study that definitively confirms racial profiling in trained law enforcement:

“A series of University of California/University of Chicago studies recreated the experience of a police officer confronted with a potentially dangerous suspect, and found that:

participants fired on an armed target more quickly when the target was African American than when White, and decided not to shoot an unarmed target more quickly when the target was White than when African American;

participants failed to shoot an armed target more often when that target was White than when the target was African American. If the target was unarmed, participants mistakenly shot the target more often when African American than when White;

shooting bias was greater among participants who held a strong cultural stereotype of African Americans as aggressive, violent and dangerous, and among participants who reported more contact with African Americans. shooting bias was greater among participants who held a strong cultural stereotype of African Americans as aggressive, violent and dangerous, and among participants who reported more contact with African Americans.”

We appreciate that Ari spoke up and used her platform to call out this racism and we hope she is released soon and able to seek recourse for her experience.

Law enforcement in every country need to do better to un-learn racial profiling which includes unpacking their own racism and fear.