WHATS WRONG WITH ETHNIC PROFILING?
Commentary by James A. Goldston James A. Goldston is the executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative. This commentary was published in the Beirut daily newspaper The Daily Star in collaboration with Project Syndicate (c) (http://www.project-syndicate.org/). Friday, June 26, 2009 – Several years ago, as terrorism, immigration, and unrest in suburban Paris were at the top of the news in France, a French police officer confided to a researcher: “If you consider different levels of trafficking, it is obviously done by blacks and Arabs. If you are on the road and see a black man or a man with Arabic features, you say to yourself, ‘He doesn’t look French,’ and then you might stop him to see if he has papers.” This police officer was describing a textbook example of “ethnic profiling”: the use by law-enforcement officials of stereotypes, rather than specific information about behavior, in deciding to stop, search or detain people. Ethnic profiling is illegal in Europe. It is ine
