Question

1. After reading chapter 85, Racial Profiling, under what circumstances do (or would) you condone the subordination of individual rights for the security of the community?

2. After reading chapter 85, Racial Profiling, discuss the pros and cons of the concept that the protection of public safety is more important than the protection of an individual's liberty.

http://sk.sagepub.com.ezproxy.umuc.edu/reference/criminology/n85.xml

Answer 1

1. The methods that law enforcement agents traditionally apply to identify dangerous individuals in public places include observation of behaviour of suspicious individuals by the use of knowledge gained in previous investigations. Profiling is a policing technique that attempts to predict whether or not an individual will behave in a criminal fashion by taking into account his/ her personal characteristics such as gender, race or class, rather than the actual behaviour . Thus, racial Profiling is a technique which is not targeted against a particular person but one which is used to identify members of a particular racial or ethnic group that is associated with a higher rate of criminal tendencies. In the recent time, racial profiling has come under much heated debate for inciting xenophobia and prejudices in the ranks of security officials who become trained to screen and single out individuals as crime suspects merely based on the general stereotype about high crime rates and certain ethnic groups. For example, post 9/11 in the United States, a number of investigators falsely reasoned that people from majority Muslim, and/ or the Middle East states were more likely than other individuals to be members of the international terrorist organisation, al Qaeda. As a result of the official instructions based on the racial profiling theory, large numbers of individuals from Arab and Muslim states began to be subjected to lengthier and more intimate searches in busy international airports and public places.

While, racial profiling is found to be highly problematic because of the implicit discriminatory nature of the technique, and it appears to be in violation of the First Amendment with respect to the right to dignity and liberty of the individual, it nonetheless can have its positive implications. One of the advantages of profiling is that it allows police to direct their attention from an insurmountably large crowd to individuals who are thought to pose the greatest risk of breaking the law and therefore make the necessary intervention at the right time.

More importantly, selection of individuals on the basis of their skin colour is a policy that is assessed in terms of its success in providing an opportunity to prevent thousands of deaths and extensive property destruction andthis is another crucial reason which can be said to justify the conscious subordination of the interests of the targeted individuals so as to protect the larger interests of the public.

Thus, while racial profiling is a highly controversial technique used by security personnels because of its depersonalisation of the individual whose identity gets reduced to his/her mere ethnic background, it nonetheless has a place in terms of the claims to proportionate justice as it allows to promote the interests and lives of several people over and above the denouncement of the rights of the single individual.