Is Racial Profiling Ever Justifiable?

On July 16, 2009, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates had returned home from a trip to China. As he was entering his house in Cambridge, Massasschusetts, he couldn't open the door to the house. It was jammed. He had his driver help him push the door open to his house. As they were doing so, a neighbor saw the incident around noon and she called the police because she was suspecting a possible burglarly. The police arrived and Sargeant James Crowley asks for Gates' identification. Gates becomes livid with the officer and was supposedly acting disorderly. Gates did eventually show his Harvard I.D. Gates was arrested for disorderly conduct and the charges were dropped soon after.

Gates stated that the police officer arrested him because he was a black man and was using racial profiling on him. Racial profiling is one of the debates America has had for the last several years. Is racial profiling necessary? Is it ever justifiable? If it is justifiable, what should be the limits to it? What is racial profiling? According to wikipedia, racial profiling is the inclusion of race or ethnic characteristics to determine whether a person is considered likely to commit a particular type of crime or an illegal act or to behave in a predictable manner. Some times the police will conduct traffic profiling and will pull many black people over because they may suspect they may have contraband or drugs in their vehicle. Some people may say they have a racist preference, but they may be looking at other evidence that correlates with race.

Let's suppose a certain neighborhood has many murders taking place and there's evidence that the perpetrators of those murders are Hispanic. It would then make sense in that instance to conduct racial profiling in order to maximize a successful search. Whenever there's a warrant for someone's arrest, it's necessary to identify as many features as you can about them, such as height, weight, gender, color of hair, and even race. The ACLU and other civil rights organizations have made racial profiling a dirty word. However, there are cases when racial profiling should be used. I agree that it can be abused and it shouldn't be used for frivolous reasons. The police shouldn't pull over a car to search a person of a particular ethnicity unless there's a legitimate reason for it. However, whenever there's a probable cause then it should be used for the purposes of finding those that are guilty of crimes and murders. It's for the safety of the public. How can you identify a murderer if there aren't enough details given about him? We can't use political correctness when it comes to profiling. The safety of the public is what's at stake.

After the 9/11 attacks, our government should've established a policy of racial profiling on the jet airplanes in order to identify Arabic, Muslim looking men. Our government wouldn't do that because they didn't want to be perceived as racist. This is not about racism, this is about survival. Muslim extremists are known for committing suicide missions. We should profile those kind of people. Here's some examples we need to consider. It was an Egyptian Muslim that shot Robert Kennedy in 1968. During the 1972 olympics in Munich, Germany, Muslim extremists murdered Jewish athletes. The Muslims stormed the embassy in Iran in 1979. Muslim extremists killed our Marines in Lebanon in 1983. On September 11, 2001, nineteen Muslim hijackers slammed planes into three buildings. It's foolish not to institute racial profiling in those kinds of situations.

I believe we should have a national policy of racial profiling on suspicious Muslims to fight this war on terror in our country. We don't need the civil rights community to tell us not to use it when there are terrorists that could set off bombs to blow up whole sections of our country. There are certain situations where racial profiling is justifiable. When there are a series of crimes, murders, and other incidents that take place, we must utilize racial profiling when it could be used to identify people that commit crimes. When there's a probable cause that a certain group in regards to ethnicity could be the people most likely to commit the crimes, then racial profiling should be used. The safety of the American public is the foremost responsibility of our law enforcement.