Police Profiling Research Paper

Although there is no widely accepted term for police discretion or profiling, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “police discretion” is referred to as refer to the ability to act or make a decision according to one's own choice within certain bounds.” (“Discretion”, 2011) The definition of “police profiling” is more vague which says “police profiling stems from racial profiling which refers to the use of an individual’s race or ethnicity by law enforcement personnel as a key factor in deciding whether to engage in enforcement.” (“Police Profiling”, 2011) In directly referring to law enforcement based racial discrimination, potential victims of profiling are not limited to a single skin color. Over the course of American

Farrell Ramirez of the Department of Justice says that “Hispanic Americans are singled out due to narrow minded beliefs that they have hopped the boarder and are in America to cause trouble.” (Ramirez, 2010) After the September 11th attacks profiling was soon implemented into airports around the country to supposedly aide in determining possible suspects of terrorist activity, which points the finger directly at Middle Eastern decedents. Farrell Ramirez also says that profiling is most commonly used in inner city communities with high populations of African Americans. He says “police officers pull over cars with black drivers only due to the fact that they are black.” (Ramirez, 2010) A spin off name of this is Driving While Black, or DWB, which pokes fun at the police for not being able to find any better reason to pull a car over than due to the race of the driver. However, it is important to remember that profiling can happen in any community and is based upon the biases of that region influencing the way that police do their jobs. What is not widely accepted is that law enforcement officials must take into consideration certain aspects during the course of an investigation and thus doing so does not necessarily mean that racial profiling and discrimination is

According to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, use of force is defined as the "amount of effort required by police to compel compliance by an unwilling subject.” (Neubauer, 2001, p.6) Ethical questions are being posed by media outlets related to biased based racial discrimination and the public perception of law enforcement is shed under a negative light regardless of legitimacy. Current instances of ‘police brutality’ towards minority persons are the center focus of attention, again regardless of the validity of the action by law enforcement. Police officers should exercise their arrest powers with great care… they should be circumspect about their application of force. (Perez & Moore, 2013,