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The Psychological and Philosophical Debate on Racial Profiling

On the 20th of April, 2021, the former Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin (45), who was video recorded kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for over 9 minutes, was found guilty on three charges and convicted. Chauvin was convicted of second-degree manslaughter, third-degree murder, and second-degree unintentional murder. The jurors deliberated for over 10 hours, for two days, prior to making this decision. The court’s decision was a major victory for the Black Lives Matter movement as well as for Blacks living in the US who face racial discrimination from institutions such as law enforcement.

Racial profiling is a deeply troubling and long-standing problem in the US despite the US claiming it has entered the post-racial era (Glaser, 2015). Racial profiling takes place every day in towns and cities across the country where private security and law enforcement target persons of color for often frightening and humiliating interrogations, detentions, and searches with no evidence of any criminal activity and which are based on perceived religion, national origin, ethnicity, and race (Glaser, 2015). This paper will discuss racial profiling from a philosophical and psychological perspective.

Philosophical Aspect of Racial Profiling

The philosophical approaches to racial profiling tend to operate while always detached from actual practice by the police, and this is especially true for ‘statistical discrimination,’ to racial approach. The reason is straightforward; one does not need a philosophical analysis in protesting racism and police brutality. Most philosophers assume that racial profiling is justified if it is in line with bodily integrity and dignity and equality and freedom of the racial minorities and majorities (Taylor, 2013). Therefore, they are only philosophically interested in the justification or lack of justification on the assumption that this is a practice that is not intrinsically humiliating, demeaning, or brutal and has no particular use for curtailing crime. Nonetheless, these philosophers work at a degree of abstraction, such as Kaspar Lippert-Rasmussen, Arthur Applbaum, Richard Zeckhauser, and Mathias Risse are clearly aware of and were concerned by societies’ racial injustice (Taylor, 2013). These philosophers assume explicitly that racial profiling, as practiced currently, is inconsistent with justice. However, what they want to know is whether existing racial practices currently which are unfair and unjust mean that all racial profiling forms must then be unjust. These are interested in the fact that a racist past, as shown by history and whose consequences are still present in the present-day injustices and racial inequalities, is enough to determine that all racial profiling forms are unjust. Therefore, even when the profiling abstracts from police brutality and from the deliberate mistreatment and humiliation of minorities by law enforcement, it is assumed that the interest in racial profiling is based in the context of societies similar to contemporary democracies (in contemporary democracies,  political equality formal commitments coexist with a significant level of freedom constraints and also constraints on equality of people). This is a result of the tolerated and sometimes mandated laws of racial discrimination in the recent past (Taylor, 2013).

Racial profiling is a method for preventing crime and detecting the same that the police use and which takes into account racial discrimination in selecting and investigating suspects (Birzer, 2012). Law enforcement is generally unconcerned with the identity of persons but instead is concerned with the race of the suspect. Indeed, for all purposes and intentions, racial profiling uses the morphology and color of skin, as opposed to a person’s subjective sense of self, as the main determinants of making a decision to stop a person and proceed to search the person. Hence, racial profiling can be defined as the action initiated by the police that relies on national origin, ethnicity, or race and not just the individual’s behavior; one focusing on pre-emptive and preventive profiling as opposed to profiling on crime only (Brizer, 2012). The latter focuses on the narrowing down of the suspects’ pool necessary in identifying the known crime’s perpetrator; the former is an effort at identifying persons who can potentially commit a crime such as smuggling weapons or drugs, whether they have actually engaged in the crime or not such as purchasing the illegal weapons to commit the crime. Racial profiling that is preemptive is controversial because there is yet to be any crime committed and because race plays a big part in the decision to intervene. Police tactics based on preemptive assumptions, for example, the ‘stop and sear