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Inflammatory rhetoric on racial profiling can undermine police services.

Article Excerpt
This commentary was prompted by the recent debate in this journal (CJCCJ 45.3, July 2003) exploring allegations of racial profiling on the part of the Metro Toronto Police Service. My intention is to deal with the issue more generally, rather than to comment specifically on the situation in Toronto.

I share with many commentators the concern about "racial profiling"; however, this mutual concern has little meaning when the term has such varied connotations. My preference is for a more narrow usage, as broader definitions include law enforcement practices that, arguably, are legitimate. Therefore, "racial profiling," as defined here, is a form of racial bias whereby citizens are stopped, questioned, searched, or even arrested on the basis of their minority status per se, rather than due to a demonstrated, elevated risk of lawbreaking.

Several rigorous studies undertaken in the United States provide evidence of such "racial profiling." For example, John Lamberth of Temple University (cited in Harris 1999) sent out teams of observers to the New Jersey Turnpike and, based on observations of over 42,000 vehicles, found that black and white drivers violated traffic laws at virtually identical rates. However, police records indicated that 35% of those stopped and 73% of those stopped and arrested were black, while only 13.5% of the cars on the road had a black driver or passenger. Lamberth concluded that "it would appear that the race of the occupants and/or drivers of the cars is a decisive factor [in the number of stops of blacks] or a factor with great explanatory power" (Harris 1999: 198).

Lamberth's study illustrates what I consider to be the two main elements of "racial profiling": (1) members of a visible minority group have a significantly elevated likelihood of being subject to some form of police action, and (2) the more aggressive targeting of that group is due to the group's visible minority status, rather than to behavioural differences that might warrant a higher level of police scrutiny.

Alan Gold, one of Canada's most prominent barristers, adopts a precise definition and one that is consistent with the above: "racial profiling is thus profiling (i.e., identification of target criminals) based upon one characteristic: race. If is an attempt to identify previously undetected criminals based upon the single factor of race" (2003: 394).

According to the above definitions, "racial profiling" is a consistent tendency on the part of members of a police service to target a group in the absence of credible evidence that might warrant such targeting. Unfortunately, definitions of this phenomenon are often so broad that they include reasonable and legitimate police practices.

It is worth contrasting the definition provided by Scot Wortley and Julian Tanner with those advanced above. They write,

In the criminological literature, racial profiling is said to exist when the members of certain racial or ethnic groups become subject to greater levels...