Is This Racial Profiling?

A few years ago I read an Op-Ed piece written by a white man who claimed he had been a victim of racial profiling and now understood the problem. This man made an illegal left turn and was stopped by a black police officer who issued a citation. The man later learned this police officer often staked out this intersection and only wrote tickets to white drivers for this violation.

I wrote a response in which I pointed out how this was not racial profiling. It was racial discrimination. This officer's superiors should have taken appropriate action, but this was not a case of racial profiling.

The event in question involved an illegal activity. There is no evidence this officer stopped white drivers who were not breaking the law. A traffic violation, not race, was the initial reason for the traffic stop. Both definitions found in last week's post "What is Racial Profiling" support my position. Yet at the time, I was taken to task by another reader who some how saw my letter as anti-racial profiling not realizing I had not stated in my letter if profiling was right or wrong.

Then and now, a lot of the argument over racial profiling starts with a lack of understanding of the true definition of racial profiling and a lack of trust in police by blacks and liberals. If the perpetrator of a crime fits a certain race, it should be ok for authorities to look for people in the area who fit the racial description as long as the entire description is used. In other words, if the description is of a tall black man, police should not grab short black men, but they can question tall black men in the area. This is based upon the definitions given by the ACLU and by Amnesty International.

Based on these definitions, the op-ed writer is not a victim of racial profiling. He is simply a person who got caught.