Racial Profiling
Our eyes became wide open on September 11, 2001.That day was the start of some widely spread controversial topics that still are carried on today. Our federal government started to use different methods to try and combat terrorism. However, some organizations believe that they are just over-stepping their boundaries and violating rights of Arabs and other individuals of Middle Eastern origins. They are using methods that are considered to be racial profiling. In order to understand racial profiling, it must first be correctly defined. Although different authors use different criteria for the term racial profiling, Merriam-Webster’s definition for the word racial is “of, relating to, or based on a race (Merriam-Webster, 2010).” The definition the dictionary puts forth for profiling is “the act of suspecting or targeting a person solely on the basis of observed characteristics or behavior. Based on these definitions, racial profiling could be defined for criminal justice purposes as targeting a person based solely on the characteristic of race. Most people, law enforcement officers included, would consider racial profiling based on this definition as ethically wrong. However, a case must be made for the use of profiling based on race in some circumstances. In my opinion when our nation has been threatened and we feel it necessary for the safety and security to detain an individual I completely agree that it can be used in an ethical manner. I have little doubt in my mind that if a radical group of Americans bombed another county, that the other county would also detain any American who traveled there to double check what they are visiting for and have no ties to the radical groups. So I agree that you can use race but there just has to be more evidence with it.
Critics claim that racial profiling has no place within the justice system because it targets minorities who are not necessarily doing anything illegal. They argue that the evidence...