Rethinking Racial Profiling: A Critique of the Economics, Civil Liberties, and Constitutional Literature, and of Criminal Profiling More Generally

• Published in: The University of Chicago law review Vol. 71; no. 4; pp. 1275 - 1381
• Main Author: Harcourt, Bernard E.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chicago University of Chicago Law School 01-10-2004; University of Chicago, acting on behalf of the University of Chicago Law Review
• Subjects: Affirmative action; African Americans; Automobile drivers; Civil liberties; Criminal investigations; Criminal justice; Criminal profiling; Economic models; Economists; Efficiency; Evidence; Hispanic Americans; Hispanics; Law enforcement; Minority & ethnic groups; Police; Police services; Population; Race; Racial discrimination; Racial harassment; Racial profiling; Racism; Search and seizure; Statistical analysis; United States > US
• ISSN: 0041-9494; 1939-859X

New reporting requirements and data collection efforts by over four hundred law enforcement agencies across the country are producing a continuous flow of new evidence on highway police searches. For the most part, the data consistently show disproportionate searches of African-American and Hispanic motorists in relation to their estimated representation on the road. Economists, civil liberties advocates, legal and constitutional scholars, political scientists, lawyers, and judges are poring over the new data and reaching, in many cases, quite opposite conclusions about racial profiling. Racial profiling on the highways may increase the overall number of persons transporting drugs on the highways and likely produces a ratchet effect on the minority motorist population. The real problems with racial profiling, then, are not so much problems about race, as they are about criminal profiling. The trouble is that criminal profiling tends to aggravate the prejudices and biases that are built into the penal law.