Race Based Policing

There are probably no more than half a dozen good reasons to commit the time necessary to write a book. Certainly there are some financial incentives, and academic recognition is important to someone like me. But the most important reason to write a book such as this is having something important to say. Racial profiling is an emerging issue. It is by all accounts the most critical issue facing American policing today. It tears at the heart of our sense of fairness and social equity. It threatens to adversely affect the legitimacy of our entire legal system. Unfortunately, most of what we know or think we know about racial profiling comes to us from rather suspicious sources. The controversy is highly influenced by individuals and groups with alternative political and social agendas. A finding of racial disparity in police stops may lead one researcher to conclude racial profiling is rampant in the community, while another researcher, looking at the same data, may conclude the opposite. Some disagreement among scholars is understandable. There are considerable differences in how scholars are trained to approach social science research. It is even likely that disagreement among scholars substantially advances science and is therefore good for the growth of knowledge. But much of the conflict in the current controversy has nothing to do with academic training, the peer review process, or the advancement of scientific knowledge. It is about advancing a particular political or social agenda under the umbrella of legitimate social science inquiry, and that is offensive to all of us who care deeply about the inherent rights of individuals and the importance of policing by consent. The purpose of this book is to move the racial profiling controversy from its current rhetorical base into a reasoned argument. It is my objective to move racial profiling inquiry away from exaggerated and overreaching conclusions and into the realm of bona fide scientific investigation. In doing so, I have purposely limited the use of anecdotal stories from victims of racial profiling. While these stories provide a human richness to the issue and have likely advanced the media's attention on the controversy, they do little to improve our understanding of why minorities are overrepresented in police stops. The uniqueness of this book, compared to others available today, lies in its lack of a priori assumptions about the nature of American policing and police officers. The book neither attempts to indict the police nor support them. Instead, the focus of this book is on the scientific investigation of racial profiling. It has been my desire to offer an objective view of the evidence, so far, as well as a thorough treatise of what we do not know. It is my sincere hope that political leaders, police administrators, training academy instructors, scholars, and, of course, students will find the information in these pages useful as they grapple with the difficult political, administrative, and methodological issues associated with the racial profiling controversy. Any author who writes on a topic like racial profiling assumes some risk of offending readers over his use of terms. Throughout the text I use the termBlackto describe African American,Hispanicto describe Latino or Mexican American,Whiteto describe Caucasian,Asian, andNative American. The use of the termBlackis likely controversial. It is intended to describe all individuals with black skin, regardless of their national origin or ethnicity. The term, albeit imprecise as an indicator of race, is consistent with my understanding of the racial profiling controversy in that it is the perception of race, rather than an individual's actual race, that allegedly influences a police officer's decision to stop. The termHispanicis used to describe an individual's ethnicity. While some researchers consider Hispanic a rWithrow, Brian L. is the author of 'Race Based Policing', published 2005 under ISBN 9780131273795 and ISBN 0131273795.