In the United States, racial profiling affects thousands of Americans every day. Both individuals and institutions—such as law enforcement agencies, government bodies, and schools—routinely use race or ethnicity as grounds for suspecting someone of an offense. The high-profile deaths of unarmed people of color at the hands of police officers have brought renewed national attention to racial profiling and have inspired grassroots activism from groups such as Black Lives Matter. Combining rigorous research with powerful personal stories, this insightful title explores the history, the many manifestations, and the consequences of this form of social injustice.

In Suspect Race, social psychologist and public policy expert Jack Glaser leverages a century's worth of social psychological research to provide a clear understanding of how stereotypes, even those operating outside of conscious awareness or control, can cause police to make discriminatory judgments and decisions about who to suspect, stop, question, search, use force on, and arrest. Glaser argues that stereotyping, even nonconscious stereotyping, is a completely normal human mental process, but that it leads to undesirable discriminatory outcomes. Additionally, he finds evidence that racial profiling can actually increase crime, and he considers the implications for racial profiling in counterterrorism. Suspect Race brings to bear the vast scientific literature on intergroup stereotyping to offer the first in-depth and accessible understanding of the primary cause of racial profiling, and to explore implications for policy.

Argues that racial profiling by police officers, highway troopers, and customs officials is morally reprehensible and does not help catch criminals, but rather contributes to the moral decay of American society.

Many racial minority communities claim profiling occurs frequently in their neighborhoods. Police authorities, for the most part, deny that they engage in racially biased police tactics. A handful of books have been published on the topic, but they tend to offer only anecdotal reports offering little reliable insight. Few use a qualitative methodol

Many racial and ethnic groups in the United States, including blacks, Hispanics, Asians, American Indians, and others, have historically faced severe discriminationâ€"pervasive and open denial of civil, social, political, educational, and economic opportunities. Today, large differences among racial and ethnic groups continue to exist in employment, income and wealth, housing, education, criminal justice, health, and other areas. While many factors may contribute to such differences, their size and extent suggest that various forms of discriminatory treatment persist in U.S. society and serve to undercut the achievement of equal opportunity. Measuring Racial Discrimination considers the definition of race and racial discrimination, reviews the existing techniques used to measure racial discrimination, and identifies new tools and areas for future research. The book conducts a thorough evaluation of current methodologies for a wide range of circumstances in which racial discrimination may occur, and makes recommendations on how to better assess the presence and effects of discrimination.

Karen S. Glover investigates the social science practices of racial profiling inquiry, examining their key influence in shaping public understandings of race, law, and law enforcement. Commonly manifesting in the traffic stop, the association with racial minority status and criminality challenges the fundamental principle of equal justice under the law as described in the U.S. Constitution. Communities of color have long voiced resistance to racialized law and law enforcement, yet the body of knowledge about racial profiling rarely engages these voices. Applying a critical race framework, Glover provides in-depth interview data and analysis that demonstrate the broad social and legal realms of citizenship that are inherent to the racial profiling phenomenon. To demonstrate the often subtle workings of race and the law in the post-Civil Rights era, the book includes examination of the 1996 U.S. Supreme Court's Whren decision-a judicial pronouncement that allows pretextual action by law enforcement and thus widens law enforcement powers in decisions concerning when and against whom law is applied.

This book was written to eliminate confusion regarding what has come to be called racial profiling by clarifying the legitimate law enforcement practice of criminal profiling, and by clarifying what constitutes unfair discrimination, and persecution. This book was written to benefit sociology students, law enforcement officers, and anyone else in a position to be concerned with, or affected by, the profiling issue. Police administrators, judges, and legislators, must adequately understand the topics and their many ramifications if they are to make decisions that are based on fact rather than stereotype and myth, and free from the influence of adverse social and political pressures. And, attorneys, when prosecuting or defending cases wherein profiling and discrimination is an issue must have good insight into the many interrelated dynamics of the topics to properly prepare and argue their case. This writing explores difficult social issues that are often poorly understood, but issues that need to be understood if solutions are to be meaningful. And, a poorly conceived solution is especially likely when the issues are both complex and controversial. In this book, the writers acknowledge that while criminal profiling is a necessary and legitimate law enforcement practice, unchecked bias can pollute the practice. And, while they acknowledge that measures to detect those whose enforcement practices reflect bias can have merit, they emphasize that such efforts must be in addition to the hiring of high caliber officers, providing quality training, providing competent leadership, and on a properly staffed and trained Internal Affairs department. But, the authors also emphasize the unfortunate fact that many efforts intended to prevent bias are to varying degrees ineffectual and create collateral problems. Germane to that discussion is illumination of the difficulties of monitoring fair treatment policies, and the unintended problems that often accompany consent decrees.