racial profiling
US policing practice where race, not conduct, decides who is stopped and searched
Racial profiling is, in a US law enforcement context, the practice whereby police or other authorities allow a person's race or ethnicity — rather than concrete conduct or individual suspicion — to determine whether that person is stopped, checked, searched or made the subject of an investigation. The concept belongs to American law and legal culture and has no direct parallel in Danish legislation. The practice rests on the mistaken assumption that people of a particular race or ethnicity are statistically more prone to crime than others. That assumption is not only empirically untenable, it also violates fundamental legal principles of individual treatment and equality.
There is no single comprehensive federal statute that generally prohibits or codifies racial profiling as a concept. The clearest legal definition of the term appears in proposed federal legislation, under which the actions of a law enforcement authority qualify as racial profiling when they are based "to any degree" on a person's actual or perceived race, ethnicity, national origin or religion in the choice of investigative steps.
In the case of the murder of Carol Stuart in Boston in 1989, the concept took on concrete and dramatic significance. Charles Stuart accused a Black man of killing his pregnant wife, and the police responded with a massive and aggressive effort directed at Black men in the affected neighbourhoods — including stops, questioning and arrests — that rested not on individual suspicion but on race. One particular Black man, William Bennett, was presented as the presumed perpetrator on that basis. When it later emerged that Charles Stuart was himself the perpetrator, the case became a textbook example of how racial profiling can lead to fundamentally mistaken and unjust investigative outcomes.
The Boston case contributed to a broader national debate about racial profiling as a systemic problem in American policing and illustrated the human and due-process consequences the practice can have when race replaces evidence as the basis for an investigation.
