The Roots of Racial Profiling

"While incidents of racial profiling are widely deplored today, there is little said about the actual root cause ofthe phenomenon. The standard explanations for racial profiling focus on institutional rxism, but that idea runs contrary to the sea change in social attitudes that has taken place over the last four d.ecadesO. n the contrary, the practice of racial profiling grows from a trio of very tangible sources, all attributable to the War on Drugs, that $37 billion annual effort on the part of local, state, and federal lawmakers and cops to stop the sale and use of “illicit” substances. The sources include the difftculty in policing victimless crimes in general and the resulting need for intrusive police techniques; the greater relevancy of this difficulty given the intensification of the drug war since the 1980s; and the additional incentive that asset forfeiture laws give police forces to seize money and property from suspectsS. incet he notion of scaling back, let alone stopping, the drug war is too controversial for most politicians to handle, it’s hardly surprising that its role in racial profiliig should go largely unacknowledged."