Police Profiling is a good thing.

Pro says "Police profiling is effective; Police profiling is a very effective way of catching criminals and preventing crime, and allows the police to focus on areas where crime is high, and needs to be prevented." Upon what evidence is this based? This isn't an argument, it's nothing more than an assertion that is baseless. If you want to make a claim you need to have actual reasons why that claim is true to back them up. Pro says "Racial Profiling isn't racist; Whether black, white, or hispanic, a criminal is a criminal, and if more black people than hispanics commit crime, the police should focus do their duty which is to protect citizens, and make attempts to stop crime, so if the black people commit the crime, stop the black people, if the white people are the majority of criminals, stop the white people. To say that racial profiling is bad is like saying that high crime areas should be treated the same as crime free areas, and puts the lives of citizens at risk." The American Heritage dictionary defines racism as "Discrimination or prejudice based on race." That is PRECISELY what the police profiling is. Im not arguing that if a person who is robbed says the individual who robbed them was a black male that the police should look for anyone other than a black male for the crime. But that is not profiling, it is not based on demographics or statistics, it is based upon specific information about the specific individual who committed the crime. Racism is a horrible dehumanizing practice. Patricia Williams, (Associate Professor of Law, The City University of New York Law School at Queens College. University of Miami Law Review. September 1987) explains "The attempt to split bias from violence has been this society's most enduring and fatal rationalization. Prejudice does hurt, however, just as the absence of prejudice can nourish and shelter. Discrimination can repel and vilify, ostracize and alienate…a concept of "self" is a way of experiencing the other, ritualistically sharing the other's essence, and cherishing it. In our culture, seeing and feeling the dimension of harm that results from separating self from "other" requires more work. Very little in our language or our culture encourages or reinforces any attempt to look at others as part of ourselves…This structure of thought is complicated by the fact that the distancing does not stop with the separation of the white self from the black other. In addition, the cultural domination of blacks by whites means that the black self is placed at a distance even from itself…blacks are conditioned from infancy to see in themselves only what others who despise them see…our culture constructs some, but not all, selves to be the servants of others. Thus, some "I's" are defined as "your servant," some as "your master." The struggle for the self becomes not a true mirroring of self-in-other, but rather a hierarchically-inspired series of distortions, where some serve without ever being served, some master without ever being mastered, and almost everyone hides from this vernacular domination by clinging to the legally official definition of "I" as meaning "your equal." In such an environment, relinquishing the power of individual ethical judgment to a collective ideal risks psychic violence, an obliteration of the self through domination by an all powerful other…What links child abuse, the mistreatment of women, and racism is the massive external intrusion into psyche that dominating powers impose to keep the self from ever fully seeing itself…The self becomes subservient to the other, with no reciprocity, and the other becomes a whimsical master…Caught in conversations like this, blacks as well as whites will feel keenly and pressingly circumscribed. Perhaps most people never intend to be racist, oppressive, or insulting. Nevertheless…the unintentional exile of individuals as well as races may be quietly accomplished." By saying that profiling is acceptable, you make racist practices seem more acceptable not only to police, but also to the general public as well. You entrench that racism not just in hearts and minds, but in the very systems of justice that are meant to be unbiased and colorblind. Here is an example of police profiling in action: A "well-dressed young African-American man driving his Ford Explorer on I-75 sees the blue lights of the Georgia State Patrol car behind him. The officer pulls behind the sport utility vehicle and the young man's heart begins to sink. He is on his way to Atlanta for a job interview. The stop, ostensibly for speeding, should not take long, he reasons, as the highway patrol officer walks cautiously toward the Explorer. But instead of simply asking for a driver's license and writing a speeding ticket, the trooper calls for backup. Another trooper soon arrives, his blue lights flashing as well. The young man is told to leave his vehicle, as the troopers announce their intention to search it. "Hey, where did you get the money for something like this?" one trooper asks mockingly while he starts the process of going through every inch of the Explorer. Soon, an officer pulls off an inside door panel. More dismantling of the vehicle follows. They say they are looking for drugs, but in the end find nothing. After ticketing the driver for speeding, the two officers casually drive off. Sitting in his now-trashed SUV, the young man weeps in his anger and humiliation." I ask the Pro to show how this is in any way a good thing or an effective us of law enforcements time. From http://www.reason.com... "the use of class probability in police investigations is correctly regarded with extreme suspicion, as it violates a basic principle of justice: The legal system should treat all citizens equally, until there is specific, credible evidence that they have committed a crime. In the cases we've been discussing, we can say that the odds that any particular young black or Hispanic man will be hassled by the police are much higher than for a white man who, aside from his race, is demographically indistinguishable from him." Here are the statistics being referred to: 76 percent of the motorists stopped along a 50-mile stretch of I-95 by Maryland's Special Traffic Interdiction Force (STIF) were black, according to an Associated Press computer analysis of car searches from January through September 1995....Blacks constitute 25 percent of Maryland's population, and 20 percent of Marylanders with driver's licenses." As this story was being written, New Jersey was holding hearings on racial profiling, and one state police investigator testified that 94 percent of the motorists stopped in one town were minorities. Minorities are not only more likely to be stopped than whites, but they are also often pressured to allow searches of their vehicles, and they are more likely to allow such searches. In March, The New York Times reported that a 1997 investigation by New Jersey police of their own practices found that "turnpike drivers who agreed to have their cars searched by the state police were overwhelmingly black and Hispanic." The practice of police profiling violates basic tenets of our legal system and the liberties that all Americans are guaranteed. Equality in treatment is supposed to be a cornerstone of our legal system, and police profiling clearly violates that, and promotes racist and discriminatory practices, with no beneficial results. If a black man or a hispanic man or a white man commits a crime they should be punished for a crime, but police profiling isn't about punishing a specific individual for a specific crime that is being investigated. Instead, they make it a crime to be a minority by disproportionately targeting them with unreasonable searches based on nothing but the color of their skin. That is not what America is about, and is contrary to the ideals of our Justice system.