Is Racial Profiling Justified?
Fearful that Americans are willing to exchange some of their civil liberties for increased security, civil rights activists foresee increased difficulties in combating racial profiling, according to The Miami Herald. “The rules are changing. Where [profiling] may have been against blacks or Hispanics, it’s changed to Arabs or Middle Easterners,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a sociologist directing an antiprofiling survey for the Miami-Dade County Police Department. Alpert’s study was launched earlier this year amid complaints by activists that some officers and specialty patrols stop citizens solely on the basis of their color or ethnicity. Researchers are collecting information from traffic stops to see if minorities are being stopped at a disproportionate rate. Hot lines set up by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights have been flooded with complaints by Muslims and other Middle Easterners that they have become targets of harassment, either by neighbors or employers, or at airports, solely on