Racial/Religous Profliling

First let me thank you for accepting my challenge. The debate revolves around two different issues. The first being whether racial profiling is a rational position and the second is whether religious profiling is a rational position. I will first argue the former. Usually the topic of racial profiling comes up when discussing whether law enforcement should monitor a community with a high percentage of a certain race more strictly under the presumption that that race has a higher chance of committing violent crimes based on previous data. For the purposes of this argument I am going to use the popular example of racial profiling in the context of African American communities, however this argument applies to any race. Specifically, that police should patrol African American communities because African Americans are more prone to commit violent or illegal crimes. Now I'm sure my opponent would concede that there is nothing innate about African Americans that make them more likely to commit illegal crimes. Skin color doesn't have anything to do with one's behavior. Most proponents of racial profiling point to statistics when justifying racial profiling with the argument that since African Americans are more likely to commit crimes, we should increase police presence in communities which have more African Americans to prevent crimes. The problem with this argument is two fold. First, it doesn't explain why African Americans have a higher chance of committing crimes. Second, increasing the number of police units in African American communities is likely to increase the number of arrests in these communities because there are more police there. With the former problem, the reason why African Americans have a higher chance of committing crime isn"t because of there skin colour, but because of the fact that African Americans are on disproportionately poorer than other races due to general racial discrimination [1]. Crime is more correlated to one"s economic situation than to one"s race. Specifically, economic, employment, and familial instability are more likely to lead to one committing illegal acts [2]. Where instability is referred to as " the experience of change in individual or family circumstances where the change is abrupt, involuntary, and/or in a negative direction" [2]. My other contention with the general argument is that increasing the number of police units in minority communities would prevent more crimes. This statement is false as it has been shown numerous times that increasing the number of police patrolling a certain community only leads to an increase of the number of arrests due to the fact that there is more police there. That is to say, if you increase the number of police units in any neighborhood, whether it be a neighborhood with a majority of black people or whether it be a neighborhood with a majority of white people, the number of arrests would likely increase. The major problem is that these policies that aim to increase the number of police patrolling a certain neighborhood usually aim minority communities more due to institutionalized racism. Sullivan and O"Keefe from the Washington Post have a great article discussing this in more detail, but their major conclusion is that civilian complaints of major crimes decrease when police patrolling decreases [3]. Now I am going to turn my focus on to religious profiling. Let me start by declaring that I am a Muslim and therefore you may judge me as being biased towards this subject, however, my argument will be based on pure logic and facts and should therefore not be judged as biased. This topic will be a little bit more tricky since religious profiling aims to profile people based on an ideological difference from the majority of the population. Here I will use the example of Muslims immigrating into the United States as that seems to be the most popular example explored in mainstream media these days. Let me start by pointing out one basic idea that many scholars agree on and that is that the religion of Islam isn"t inherently more violent than let"s say Christianity. If one was to say that the Quran has violent verses therefore making Islam violent, one must also say that Christianity is a violent religion as both the new and old testament both have an abundance of violent verses in them. If one was to say that Islam is a religion of peace, then one should also concede that Christianity is a religion of peace. I am willing to further debate this point if need be. It is also worth pointing out the numbers in terms of the proportions of religions found in the world today. A quick Google search (or Bing if you prefer) will reveal that out of the 7.3 billion people living on earth today, 2 billion people identify as Christians, 1.2 billion people identify as Muslims, 1.1 billion are non-religious, and the rest comprise of other religions including Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, etc... [4] Now if we just take the two most popular religions into account, that is Islam and Christianity, that comprises about 44 % of the population of the world. Now my point is this, if we were to consider Muslims as being inherently violent people due to their religion, we should also consider Christians as being inherently violent people and therefore should profile both religions, thereby profiling and discriminating against 44% of the population. My second and more important point is as follows: the idea that Muslims are violent because of their religion does not hold. Yes I concede maybe there is a disproportionate amount of Muslims that are violent but this isn"t because of what the Quran says, or else by the same logic we should judge Christians as being violent due to what the Bible says. The reason why Muslims are disproportionately involved in terrorist acts is similar as to why African Americans are more likely to commit illegal crimes, because of poor economic situations. But also, Muslims see Western countries such as the United States pursuing perpetual war in the name of democracy but really in the name of maximizing profits from oil rigs and they seek revenge. So the reason why Muslims commit these atrocious acts is because of a socio-political situation that they are stuck with. And that isn"t to say that Muslims in the Middle East are more likely to commit terrorist acts because there are more terrorists raised in the United States than from the countries that were under Trump"s "Muslim Ban" [5]. In fact, there were zero fatal terrorist attacks committed by people from the countries banned by Trump in the last 42 years [6]. So Muslims don"t disproportionately commit terrorists acts because of their religion, nor do they commit terrorists acts because of where they come from, but they do so because of a complex socio-political situation that the Muslims find themselves in with regards to their identity and their origin, and to say anything other than that is superficial and false. References: [1] http://www.pewresearch.org... [2] http://www.urban.org... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com... [4] http://www.newsmax.com... [5] http://www.independent.co.uk... [6] https://www.theatlantic.com...