Racial profiling is ineffective and an immature way of identifying criminals or terrorists. The concept of racial profiling reasons that if a person who has committed this crime is of a certain race, then people of that race will be more likely than those of other races to commit the same crime. This is a situation more commonly known as the association fallacy, where because one individual who is part of a group has a characteristic, one who is also part of that group inherently has that characteristics.
Connecting two people’s actions solely because of their race is prejudicial and leads to strengthening stereotypes and people’s perception of certain demographics. Yes, a majority or minority of these people within this race take part in a certain action, but it does not mean that all people of this race or that give an appearance of originating from this race take part in this action. Believers in racial profiling say that two people who are the same race will act the same and do the same things just because they have similar racial backgrounds. Some may even argue that it’s not because of these people’s races, but because of their country of origin.
It is fair to say that the United States hasn’t been attacked by all the countries in the world, so why not focus on the people whose origins are from countries the United States has been in conflict with? It’s because this doesn’t fit the concept racial profiling at all. What racial profiling looks at is the color of your skin, nothing from your background at all, including country of origin. It’s based on all a police officer or a TSA agent can tell from one glance at you. A person could be a fourth generation citizen in the United States but still look like they fit the racial profile that law enforcement has been told to ‘pay special attention to.'
Each person is an individual and should be judged by their actions...not by the color of their skin. It isn’t fair for a person to already be marked as more likely to commit a certain crime because of the way they look. The average person doesn’t have control over the way they naturally appear to other people, and to be judged before a police officer looks at their license or before a TSA officer checks their background is unfair and prejudicial.
This is why instead of profiling people racially, law enforcement should look at backgrounds and past actions instead of judging a person by the color of their skin.
