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Order InfoSubject:LawTopic:see instructionsType of work:Annotated BibliographyLevel:--Number of pages:2 pages = 250Grade:High Quality (Normal Charge)Formatting style:APALanguage Style:English (U.S.)Sources: 4Website Region:United StatesCustomer TimInstructionsHer 8 Nov 2020 02:03 The topic is Racial Profiling. Check the attachment for the articles. Disclaimer: This is a machine generated PDF of selected content from our databases. This functionality is provided solely for your convenience and is in no way intended to replace original scanned PDF. Neither Cengage Learning nor its licensors make any representations or warranties with respect to the machine generated PDF. The PDF is automatically generated "AS IS" and "AS AVAILABLE" and are not retained in our systems. CENGAGE LEARNING AND ITS LICENSORS SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY AND ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES FOR AVAILABILITY, ACCURACY, TIMELINESS, COMPLETENESS, NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Your use of the machine generated PDF is subject to all use restrictions contained in The Cengage Learning Subscription and License Agreement and/or the Gale Academic OneFile Terms and Conditions and by using the machine generated PDF functionality you agree to forgo any and all claims against Cengage Learning or its licensors for your use of the machine generated PDF functionality and any output derived therefrom. Racial Profiling: Past, Present, and Future? Author: David A. Harris Date: Wntr 2020 From: Criminal Justice(Vol. 34, Issue 4) Publisher: American Bar Association Document Type: Article Length: 7,803 words Full Text: The beginning of 2019 marked 22 years since the introduction of the first piece of proposed legislation on racial profiling: the Traffic Stops Statistics Act of 1997, H.R. 118. Passed unanimously by the US House of Representatives in March 1998, this bill constituted the first attempt by any legislative body to come to grips with what had become known as "racial profiling": the police practice of stopping black and brown drivers in disproportionate numbers for traffic infractions, in attempts to investigate other crimes for which the police had no evidence. The tactic, used to target drug interdiction evidence on highways and interstates across the country, had existed for years. But it had come to wider public knowledge in the early and middle 1990s with the filings of legal actions against the New Jersey and Maryland state police forces. With passage of the bill in the House, law enforcement organizations, which had previously taken no notice of the bill, announced their opposition. With the onset of the Clinton impeachment proceedings, the bill never advanced in the Senate, and did not pass. But the Act had a wider effect: Multiple states passed anti-racial profiling legislation over the next several years, and a more comprehensive bill--the End Racial Profiling Act (ERPA)--was introduced in every successive Congress over the decade. In the arena of public discussion, the first bill's passage by the House changed the debate, bringing the issue of racial profiling front and center for the first time. It surfaced in the 2000 presidential election debates, and even in the first speech to the Congress given by President George W Bush, in which he vowed that his administration would end the practice once and for all. Looking back from the distance of two decades, we know that this did not happen. Racial profiling did not end with the Bush administration; in fact, it intensified, even while it changed shape and took on new targets. But the tactic remained the same: using racial or ethnic appearance as an indicator of suspicion, followed by law enforcement engagement. It is important to acknowledge that many American police departments have made efforts to address racial profiling. They have recognized the reality of the practice and used their own internal rules, regulations, and policies to prohibit it. They have also incorporated those policies into training. Some smaller number of departments have also committed to collecting data on all traffic stops, stops and frisks, and other routine police practices. But the unfortunate reality is that racial profiling remains with us. Where does this practice stand now? What evidence exists on how it works to achieve crime-fighting and public safety goals? And what effects does the practice have in the communities supposedly served by aggressive forms of policing? We do not lack ways to confront and root out this tactic and the damage it does; what we need now--what we have always needed--remains the political will to challenge and change what law enforcement does on a basic level. We knew in 2000, and we know now, that racial profiling does not make us safer. In fact, it may make us less safe, as it misses its intended targets, blinds law enforcement, and serves as salt in the wounds that keep police departments and communities of color at odds and apart from each other. A Definition, and a Little History Understanding racial profiling requires a good working definition. Though some prefer other names for the tactic--for example, biased policing or bias-based policing--racial profiling remains the most common term. For purposes of this discussion, I define racial profiling as the law enforcement practice of using race, ethnicity, national origin, or religious appearance as one factor, among others, when police decide which people are suspicious enough to warrant police stops, questioning, frisks, searches, and other routine police practices. Notice that this definition does not require that racial or ethnic appearance acts as the sole factor motivating what an officer does; such a narrow conception would define racial profiling out of existence because few if any law enforcement encounters occur based on a single factor. Note also that using a reasonably detailed description that includes the race of a suspect who has been observed is not racial profiling. If a witness describes the person seen running from the convenience store that just experienced a robbery as male, black, five foot ten inches tall, 20 to 24 years old, wearing a green sweatshirt and black Nike sneakers, and having a mustache and a goatee, a police bulletin using this description does not constitute racial profiling. Rather, it constitutes good police work. Race, in the context of a reasonably detailed description, is a better descriptor than any clothing worn or facial hair; a suspect can change both of those with ease. Racial appearance, in contrast, does not change, and sticks in the mind. Historically, racial targeting by police did not start in the late twentieth century. It has constituted a fact of life for African Americans as long as there have been organized police forces in the United States--indeed, even before that, with the slave patrols of the American Antebellum South. But what we think of as racial profiling, in a somewhat systematic modern form, really took shape in the last two decades of the twentieth century, beginning in Florida. (See, e.g., David A. Harris, Profiles in Injustice-. Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work (2002).) In the 1980s, a Florida state trooper named Bob Vogel, engaged in drug interdiction along the state's highways, began to put together a list of factors that, he said, kept coming up in all of his biggest and most important drug busts. Never mind that the lists were by nature incomplete and selective; they only included instances in which the trooper had stopped drivers and found drugs, not ones in which the effort had been unsuccessful. The tactic made Vogel somewhat of a celebrity; he was interviewed on network television news shows, and he won election as Sheriff of Volusia County, Florida. The DEA took notice and created its own system of factors, systematizing them into profiles. This all resulted in an effort that brought the federal government into the effort in a big way: Operation Pipeline. This program, which began in 1986, used millions of dollars in federal funding to train police from all over the country in the fine points of profiling; those officers would then return to their own departments, ready to train others and set up interdiction units. (See David Kocieniewski, New Jersey Argues That the U.S. Wrote the Book on Racial Profiling, NY. Times (Nov. 29,2000), https://nyti.ms/333dReK.) The DEA denies that it made racial or ethnic appearance a factor in any of its training, but the evidence says otherwise. And the proof, as they say, was in the pudding: Once Pipeline tactics made it into the training and tactics of police forces around the country, police targeting of black drivers became systematic and common. And nowhere did this show up more clearly than in New Jersey and Maryland. In the early 1990s, state troopers in both New Jersey and Maryland appeared to have taken Operation Pipeline's instruction and encouragement into use, putting large-scale drug interdiction into effect on some of their most traveled interstate highways. In New Jersey, the most intense efforts came on the New Jersey Turnpike; in Maryland, the enforcement took place along I-95. Even in the early 1990s, the Pipeline-based tactics of both police departments had drawn lawsuits, challenging both the legality of the practice on Fourth Amendment grounds and the racial discrimination intertwined with these vehicle stops. Interdiction and enforcement, it seems, had a distinctly racial cast, and a wildly disparate impact on African Americans. In New Jersey, the Soto case put these matters into focus. (State v. Pedro Soto, 734 A.2d 350 (N.J. Super. Ct. Law Div. 1996.) New Jersey's attorney general, representing the state police, bitterly contested every allegation of wrongdoing in the case, especially charges of racially biased enforcement. But the existence of the legal action created, for the first time, the opportunity to measure whether the state police were, in fact, targeting black drivers. Using a study protocol designed by Dr. John Lamberth of Temple University, the expert retrained by the Soto team, hard numbers based on in-person observation on the New Jersey Turnpike--the location of the Pipeline-inspired interdiction efforts- proved that the race of the drivers played the dominant role in determining which drivers police pulled over and which vehicles and people were searched by obtaining so-called voluntary consent. Lamberth first confirmed the conventional wisdom among police officers who spent their time enforcing traffic laws: Police could stop any driver they chose for a traffic infraction because all drivers committed some traffic infraction over a minimal time and distance. Second, and much more importantly, Lamberth showed that while all drivers could be stopped, it was African Americans drivers who police stopped at a vastly higher rate than one would expect, given the percentage of African American drivers on the Turnpike. With blacks only 13.5 percent of those on the road, blacks made up approximately 35 percent of all of those stopped by police--19.45 standard deviations. (Statisticians calculate standard deviations to determine whether the difference between two numbers is real--i.e., statistically significant--or the result of pure chance. Generally, the difference between two numbers is considered statistically significant at about two standard deviations.) The chances of such a difference between those driving and those stopped occurring accidentally, Lamberth said, was "substantially less than one in one billion." The data collected in his observational study allowed Lamberth to conclude: "Absent some other explanation for the dramatically disproportionate number of stops of blacks, it would appear that the race of the occupants and/or drivers of the cars is a decisive factor or a factor with great explanatory power. I can say to a reasonable degree of statistical probability that the disparity outlined here is strongly consistent with the existence of a discriminatory policy, official or de facto, of targeting blacks for investigation__" (Harris, Profiles in Injustice, supra at 53-56.) Despite contrary conclusions from the state's expert, the judge in the case concluded that the state police had indeed been targeting African Americans on the Turnpike for years. Two more years passed after the judge's 1996 decision before the state finally conceded what the numbers and other evidence had proven: Racial profiling of African Americans on the Turnpike was "real--not imagined." A similar scenario played out in Maryland. When the Maryland state police stopped and searched a car driven by Robert Wilkins, in which Wilkins and his family members were returning to the Washington, DC, area from a funeral out of state, the police made a number of mistakes. They refused to explain satisfactorily why they had decided to stop Wilkins for a petty infraction, and they refused to abide by his statement to them that he did not consent to a search of the vehicle when asked if he would do so. Instead, Wilkins and his family members were forced to stand by the roadside as the police searched the car, even using a drug-sniffing dog, treating them like criminal drug-smuggling suspects. But perhaps the biggest mistake the police made was who they treated this way. Mr. Wilkins was not an average young black man driving a rental car with several family members; he was an attorney, steeped deeply in the law of search and seizures as part of his job at Washington's prestigious Public Defender Service. When they refused to listen to Mr. Wilkins tell them what the law did and did not allow them to do, they bought themselves a federal civil suit. (Wilkins v. Maryland State Police, Civil No. MJG-93-468 (D. Md., 1993).) That lawsuit featured another observational study by Dr. John Lamberth, which found that while 17 percent of the driving population on the interstate highway in Maryland were black, 72 percent of those stopped and searched were black--a difference that Lamberth described in his report as "literally off the charts." In language similar to that he used in New Jersey, Lamberth said that "[wjhile no one can know the motivation of each individual trooper in conducting a traffic stop, the statistics presented herein ... show without question a racially discriminatory impact on blacks" that is "sufficiently great that, taken as a whole, they are consistent and strongly support the assertion that the state police targeted the community of black motorists for stop, detention and investigation within the Interstate 95 corridor." The lawsuit also uncovered something else: a Maryland State Police internal "Criminal Intelligence Report" dated just days before the stop of Mr. Wilkins, containing an explicit profile targeting African Americans. The Wilkins case settled soon after. (Harris, Profiles in Injustice, supra at 60-62.) (Robert Wilkins was later appointed a federal district judge; he now sits on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.) Is Racial Profiling Constitutional? Those who do not practice criminal law regularly may find it surprising to learn that this way of policing does not violate the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which governs search and seizure practices. But in fact, using traffic enforcement as a pretext to investigate other crimes for which police have no evidence falls within the bounds of permitted search and seizure practice. In 1996, the US. Supreme Court decided Whren v. United States., 517 U.S. 806 (1996), a case in which the Court had before it the well- known police practice of using traffic enforcement as a way to stop drivers to investigate the possibility of other crimes, primarily drug trafficking. The facts of Whren illustrated the practice perfectly. Police officers tasked with drug enforcement--not traffic patrol duties-- saw a late-model sport utility vehicle driven by a young African American man, with another African American man in the passenger seat. The officers had no reason to suspect these men or the vehicle they drove of involvement in drug trafficking or any other crime, but they followed until the driver committed a minor traffic offense. The officers pulled the vehicle over, and when they came to the windows and looked in, they observed what they immediately knew to be cocaine. Both driver and passenger were arrested, and later convicted on drug charges. Before the Supreme Court, the defendants argued that even if the police had probable cause to believe that the driver had violated the traffic code in some small way, the police had used that violation as a pretext for a stop--a Fourth Amendment seizure--for another offense (drug trafficking), for which they had no evidence. The stop and the subsequent seizure, they argued, violated the Fourth Amendment. But the Supreme Court disagreed, siding with most of the US courts of appeal that had decided cases on the issue before. As long as the police had observed an actual traffic offense that violated the jurisdiction's criminal code, they had full probable cause to stop the vehicle and the driver. It mattered not at all that the officer's real motivation had nothing to do with traffic enforcement, and everything to do with drug enforcement, for which they had no evidence. The actual motivations of the officer did not matter. That much would have been enough to give the use of pretext-based enforcement the Court's blessing. But what about the presence of race as a factor in deciding who to stop and search? Would that make for a constitutional violation? In their briefs, the defendants confronted the Court with the statistical evidence from the New Jersey and Maryland cases, showing that this kind of pretext-based enforcement had a clear racial skew: The police used it to target African Americans and Latinos. The Court acknowledged the statistical evidence but said that kind of statistical picture had no bearing on the Fourth Amendment questions of search and seizure at issue. A claim of racially discriminatory enforcement, the justices said, should come under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, in a civil lawsuit. Courts would not suppress any evidence seized under the Fourth Amendment; defendants or other aggrieved parties not arrested, like Robert Wilkins, would have to bring a lawsuit, an often difficult, long, and expensive endeavor with no guarantee of success. Thus, for Fourth Amendment purposes, the Whren decision gave a green light to the practice of racial profiling through traffic stops. Whren joined a line of earlier Supreme Court cases that allowed officers to ask for "voluntary" consent to search without any evidence of criminal behavior, as long as they did not use coercion to obtain consent (Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U.S. 218 (1973)), which officers used to turn traffic stops into searches; to question motorists during traffic stops without administering Miranda warnings (Berkemer v. McCarty, 468 U.S. 420 (1984)); to order drivers to get out of their vehicles during any traffic stop, for any reason or no reason at all (Pennsylvania v. Mimms, 434 U.S. 106 (1977)); and to look for evidence in "plain view" by looking inside the passenger compartment after stopping the vehicle (Coolidge v. New Hamphire, 403 U.S. 443 (1971)). Combined, these cases--and others still to come--allowed the full transfiguration of any traffic stop into a drug investigation or other criminal probe on the side of any highway or street, at any officer's almost unfettered discretion. And, as in Maryland and New Jersey, the great bulk of this activity focused on people of color: African Americans and Latinos engaged in that most universal of American activity: driving. This level of legal police discretion to stop and search--virtually without limits, for Fourth Amendment purposes--is what allowed the practice to take root and grow. The legal challenges to racial profiling have been numerous, but the successes have been few, given the ways in which the Supreme Court has cleared the way for police to operate. The legal theory of the Soto case in New Jersey hung not on the Fourth Amendment, but on New Jersey's own law, at the state level, that gave citizens more protection from discriminatory practices than the US Supreme Court afforded them. And the Wilkins case, in Maryland, was a civil rights lawsuit--the type of suit that the Court in Whren said should find its foundation in the Equal Protection Clause. Success in these suits is almost always difficult; most fail--sometimes because plaintiffs have criminal records and would make bad witnesses; sometimes because they lack the resources or the patience to carry a multiyear legal battle through to a conclusion; sometimes because the evidence is equivocal. Robert Wilkins was as good a plaintiff and witness as a lawyer could hope for: a Harvard Law-educated criminal defense attorney who had asserted his rights at every step in unfailingly respectful tones, and who had not a blemish on his background; a man who had a deep familiarity with the legal system, and what it took to sustain a lawsuit over the long haul. And the evidence could not have been stronger: There were the statistics, and then that internal memo written by and for the state police. Did Racial Profiling Help Police Catch More Bad Guys and Make Us Safer? With the statistics from New Jersey and Maryland offering undeniable proof that the tactic of racial profiling did not spring from the collective imagination of people stopped by police, but that it was real, the argument from police and their supporters shifted. Denial no longer seemed tenable (though many persisted in that direction), so many supporters began to argue that police used racial profiling as a reasonable and rational measure. Profiling was a good tool for catching bad guys because it helped police focus on the right people and put their resources where they would be most effective. Marshall Frank, a former police captain from Miami, put it this way in an opinion piece in the Miami Herald on October 19, 1999: "Label me a racist if you wish, but the cold fact is that African Americans comprise [sic] 12 percent of the nation's population, but occupy nearly half the state and federal prison cells. African Americans account for 2,165 inmates per 100,000 population, versus 307 for non-Hispanic whites and 823 for Hispanics." This meant, Frank argued, that African Americans commit most of the serious crimes, and until that changed, police should continue to use profiling. It was the smart thing to do. Thus, effectiveness became the question. Did focusing on the right people by using race or ethnic appearance help the police get more bad guys? Did it help them take more guns or drugs off the street? With the statistical studies in Maryland and New Jersey, and data from elsewhere, it became possible for the first time to answer this question. In my own work, I called this question the "hit rate" issue: In jurisdictions where the data showed that the police did focus their efforts on blacks and Latinos, we could compare results of stops and searches of blacks and Latinos, where race or ethnicity came into the mix of factors police used, and stops and searches of whites, where those factors played no role. How did the rate at which police "hit"--found drugs, found guns, made arrests--compare, when stops and searches of blacks and Latinos were put side- by-side with stops and searches of whites? The results surprised many. In jurisdictions using racial targeting in their stops and searches, police hit more often when they stopped and searched whites than when they searched either blacks or Latinos. The evidence squarely refuted the profiling hypothesis of Marshall Frank and so many others--that police would do better when they focused on those right people who were racial minorities. In fact, racial targeting did not improve police accuracy; it did not even result in a rate of hits the same as the rate of hits of whites. It made police accuracy--hit rates--worse. And these hit rate results held across different police departments, in different geographic areas with different missions. (Harris, Profiles in Injustice, supra at 79-84.) All in all, the statistics produced in the Soto case in New Jersey and the Wilkins case in Maryland, combined with the statistics and research on hit rates and the early efforts in Congress on the Traffic Stops Statistics Act, seemed to create a public consensus. By 1999, polling showed that almost 60 percent of all Americans understood what racial profiling was and believed it to be a widely used police tactic. Even more surprising, 81 percent of Americans said that, no matter how widespread it was, they disapproved of racial profiling and wanted it stopped. In a country long divided by race, an 81 percent consensus represented a startling development. (Frank Newport, Racial Profiling Seen as Widespread, Particularly Among Young Black Men, Gallup Poll, Dec. 9,1999.) But the terrorist attacks of September 11,2001, altered this understanding. New Waves of Profiling If the wave of police profiling of African Americans and Latinos as drug suspects had met significant public opposition, new waves of profiling lay ahead. With the terrorist attack on the United States, a new public consensus began to form. While Americans may have believed that racial profiling of blacks and Latinos in drug interdiction should end, they felt differently about profiling when the tactic focused on those viewed as potential terrorist threats. By a nearly two-to-one margin, Americans believed that the government should subject people of "Arab descent" to profiling in airports. (Jeffrey M. Jones, Americans Felt Uneasy Toward Arabs, Gallup Poll Monthly, Sept. 28, 2001.) Stanley Crouch, a well-known African American academic, author, and social critic, put it this way in his column in the New York Daily News on March 14,2002: "[A]ll those who denounce so-called Arab profiling... need to put their faces in a bowl of cold water for a few seconds and wake up.... [I]f pressure has to be kept on innocent Arabs until those Arabs who are intent on committing mass murder are flushed out, that is the unfortunate cost they must pay to reside in this nation." Thus, a new reason for racial (or ethnic or religious) profiling came along, to put the old wine of the tactic in new bottles. But there was no reason to believe that using profiling based in part on racial, ethnic, or even religious appearance would do any better job of helping police--or, in this iteration of the tactic, aviation security or antiterrorism forces--find the bad actors. And those with the greatest degree of experience in the sphere of tracking terrorism recognized this almost immediately, despite the public's eagerness to bring profiling to the "war on terror." Just weeks after the September 11 attacks, an internal government memorandum surfaced, written by senior US intelligence officials, urging those on the front lines to avoid at all costs using profiling in pursuit of possible terrorist suspects. The document, reported in the Boston Globe, urges those on the front lines to avoid the mistake of using ethnic or religious appearance as a proxy for dangerousness. They did not voice concerns about political correctness, or bad publicity, or lawsuits. Rather, their reasons were simpler and more straightforward: Profiling would fail. The only way to ferret out potential terrorists was through intelligence gathering and through careful observation of suspicious behavior. As one of the officials told the Globe, "believing that you can achieve safety by looking at characteristics instead of behavior is silly. If your goal is to prevent attacks ... you want your eyes and ears looking for pre-attack behaviors, not characteristics." (Bill Dedman, Airport Security: Memo Warns Against Use of Profiling as Defense, Bos. Globe, Oct. 12, 2001.) There were additional reasons to see danger in profiling as an anti-terrorism tool, even if the public accepted it. First, allowing or even encouraging front-line antiterror officers to use profiling would make our security system easier to defeat. Terrorist groups would simply shift to using agents with a less Middle Eastern or Muslim appearance, or to agents who had Western identities, such as the British citizen who attempted to ignite a bomb hidden in his shoe on a Detroit-bound US airliner on Christmas Day of 2009. Second, using racial or ethnic appearance--even as just one factor in addition to others--would produce great numbers of false positives, all of which security personnel must sort through and investigate, and would drain significant amounts of resources away from real threats. Third, investigating the many false positives, based on Middle Eastern or Muslim appearance, could not help but alienate these populations within the United States. If there was real danger in the U.S. of so-called sleeper cells of terrorists, as the government repeatedly claimed, police and security services would need help in spotting these individuals. Simply put, Middle Eastern and Muslim communities were the ones who could best do this. They knew the languages, the cultures, and habits of those who lived among them; they would have access to situations in which there might be real dangers of extremist threats evolving. In short, Middle Eastern and Muslim communities in the United States were the allies we needed most. And this obvious truth proved out in the earliest case of government disruption of a terrorist cell on US soil. In Lackawanna, New York, the government apprehended, charged, and imprisoned six young Middle Eastern men who had formed a cell for possible terrorist action. The authorities were able to accomplish this only because the Yemeni community in Lackawanna came forward with this information, bringing it … Trayvon Martin: Racial Profiling, Black Male Stigma, and Social Work Practice. Authors: Source: . Jan2018, Vol. 63 Issue 1, p37-46. 9p. Document Type: Article Subjects: RACIAL profiling in law enforcement Abstract: To address a critical gap in the social work literature, this article examines the deleterious effects of racial profiling as it pertains to police targeting of male African Americans. The authors use the Trayvon Martin court case to exemplify how racial profiling and black male stigma help perpetuate social inequality and injustice for black men. A racism-centered perspective is examined historically and contemporarily as a theoretical approach to understanding the role that race plays in social injustice through racial profiling. Implications for social work research design and practice aimed at increasing the social work knowledge base on racial profiling are discussed. The authors call for attention and advocacy by major social work organizations in the reduction of black male stigma and racial profiling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]   Copyright of Social Work is the property of Oxford University Press / USA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.) Lexile: ISSN: 0037-8046 DOI: 10.1093/SW/SWX049 Accession Number: 127752277 Database: MasterFILE Premier    Trayvon Martin: Racial Profiling, Black Male Stigma, and Social Work Practice.  Contents 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Full Text Listen                     To address a critical gap in the social work literature, this article examines the deleterious effects of racial profiling as it pertains to police targeting of male African Americans. The authors use the Trayvon Martin court case to exemplify how racial profiling and black male stigma help perpetuate social inequality and injustice for black men. A racism-centered perspective is examined historically and contemporarily as a theoretical approach to understanding the role that race plays in social injustice through racial profiling. Implications for social work research design and practice aimed at increasing the social work knowledge base on racial profiling are discussed. The authors call for attention and advocacy by major social work organizations in the reduction of black male stigma and racial profiling. Keywords: black men; black male stigma; critical race theory; racial profiling; racism-centered perspective The August 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin and subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman sent shock waves through America, and once again elevated race and racism as major topics for mass media debates in communities. Trayvon was a 17-year-old black high school student at the time of his shooting. While walking down the street after purchasing a bag of Skittles (candy) and a soft drink from a local convenience store, in a Sanford, Florida, neighborhood, he was pursued by an armed neighborhood watch captain, George Zimmerman. According to police reports, the decision to follow Martin was based on Zimmerman's notion that Martin was "up to no good." As a neighborhood watchman, Zimmerman called the local police who advised him to discontinue his pursuit in following Trayvon Martin. Ignoring the instructions from local police, Zimmerman ended up fatally wounding the unarmed Martin and was charged with first degree murder. His acquittal led to local, state, and national protests and became a tipping point in our national dialogue on the racial profiling of black men. Racial profiling is an act of injustice that uses race as the foundation for shaping perceptions and behaviors associated with defining who is and which groups are designated as "criminal" ([29]). This definitional system can disadvantage individuals from racial and ethnic minority groups, and has been pervasively applied to stigmatize, stereotype, and target young black men ([39]). According to U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) statistics, in 2014 black male adolescents ages 18 to 19 "were more than 10 times likely to be in state or federal prison than whites" ([15], p. 15). For all age groups, black male individuals are arrested and have the highest rate of imprisonment in state and federal facilities. This rate is 3.8 to 10.5 times more than the rate for white men and 1.4 to 3.1 times more than the rate for Hispanic men ([15]). Many contend that a primary factor explaining this precipitous incarceration rate, known as hyperincarceration, is the practice of racial profiling ([29]). Although racial profiling of young black men has received much attention in the criminal justice and criminology literature, little attention has been devoted to the topic in social work literature, which diminishes social work's ability to address this problem in several ways. First, the lack of focus leaves the social work community without a sufficient knowledge base needed to develop, evaluate, and apply evidence-based interventions to alleviate and eliminate the social problem of racial profiling. Thus, although much is written on the racial profiling of black men, the literature could be significantly enhanced by infusing the distinctive yet diverse frameworks that guide social work practice. Second, the social work profession misses the opportunity to thoroughly evaluate problems within the criminal justice system in relation to black men and their overrepresentation. Explaining and preventing the disproportionate arrest and conviction rates of black men should be a primary thrust of contemporary social work research and practice. Finally, a focus on racial profiling can help social work professionals rely more heavily on a racism-centered perspective of understanding and reducing the social problems experienced by black people, other marginalized racial and ethnic groups, and specifically black men. This article examines the social problem of racially profiling black men by discussing how racial profiling is defined and measured, how it evolved, the rationale that supports it, the role stigmatization plays in perpetuating the problem, and implications for social work practice and research. A prominent theme undergirding this text is that racism continues to be a significant factor that too often stigmatizes black men as inherent criminals. Furthermore, a racism-centered framework and critical race theory (CRT) are used as conceptual lenses for understanding the salience and impact of racial oppression in the lives of black male individuals. Racial profiling has received considerable attention in the mass media and in academic research ([  ]). However, there is ambiguity regarding what constitutes racial profiling. A widely accepted definition states that  racial  profiling  is · any police-initiated action that relies on the race, ethnicity, or national origin rather than the behavior of an individual or information that leads the police to a particular individual who has been identified as being, or having been, engaged in criminal activity. ([34], p. 3) The [  ] defined  racial  profiling  as the practice of stopping and inspecting people who are passing through public places—such as drivers on public highways, pedestrians, travelers in airports or designated localities such as urban areas—when the reason for the stop is a statistical profile of the detainee's race or ethnicity. Finally, the [37] defined  racial  profiling  as the practice of a law enforcement agent relying, to any degree, on race, ethnicity, or national origin in selecting which individuals to subject to routine investigatory activities, or in deciding on the scope and substance of law enforcement activity following the initial routine investigatory activity. Much of the research on racial profiling uses traffic stops (driving while black) as the primary measurement of this form of profiling. Aggregate data at both the national and the state level have confirmed the existence and prevalence of racial profiling. At the national level, a 2005 study by the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Justice Statistics found strong evidence of the existence of racial profiling during traffic stops. The report uncovered that "police actions taken during a traffic stop were not uniform across racial and ethnic categories" ([14], p. 10). For example, black drivers (4.5 percent) were twice as likely as white drivers (2.1 percent) to be arrested during traffic stops, whereas Hispanic drivers (65 percent) were more likely than white (56.2 percent) or black (55.8 percent) drivers to receive a ticket. In addition, white drivers (9.7 percent) were more likely than Hispanic drivers (5.9 percent) to receive a written warning, and white drivers (18.6 percent) were more likely than black drivers (13.7 percent) to be verbally warned by police. When it came to searching minority motorists after a traffic stop, "Black (9.5%) and Hispanic (8.8%) motorists stopped by police were searched at higher rates than Whites (3.6%)" ([14], p. 10). At the state and local levels, numerous studies have confirmed the practice of racial profiling by law enforcement. A report published by the [  ] regarding racial profiling in Arizona found that during 2006–2007, the state highway patrol was significantly more likely to stop black and Hispanic people than white people on all highways studied. Similarly, Native Americans and people of Middle Eastern descent were more likely to be stopped than white people on nearly all the highways studied. The Arizona Highway Patrol stopped and searched 8.5 percent of black motorists, and 8.3 percent of Hispanic motorists as compared with 2.5 percent of white motorists. However, "contraband was discovered in 3.3% of African American searches and 13.0% of Hispanic searches, as compared to a higher 14.5% for whites" ([  ], p. 7). In West Virginia, a study of traffic stops and searches discovered that black motorists were 1.64 times more likely to be stopped than white drivers. Hispanic drivers were 1.48 times more likely to be stopped than white drivers. After the traffic stop, black and Hispanic drivers were more likely than white drivers to be arrested; yet police in West Virginia obtained a significantly higher contraband hit rate for white drivers than minorities ([21]). Similarly, a study in the state of Texas by the [  ] revealed disproportionate traffic stops and searches of black and Hispanic motorists. A report on the state of Maryland found that those searched on the state's I-95 highway were 45 percent black, 15 percent Hispanic, 30 percent white, and 9 percent other ethnicities ([  ]). Finally, the [16] investigating racial profiling in Minnesota found that African American, Hispanic, and Native American drivers were all stopped and searched more often than white drivers, yet contraband was found more frequently in searches of white drivers' cars. The presupposition that black male youths are violent, aloof, and dangerous is all too often part of the socialization process and cultural narrative in America ([13]). With the advent and enforcement of civil rights legislation, open and overt forms of racism and bigotry are not publicly tolerated and are, in most cases, met with immediate and public condemnation. Suffice to say that now the United States is said to have transformed to a "color-blind society," where methods of maintaining "privilege" cannot overtly appear racially constructed ([13]). "Color blindness is associated with the liberal 1970s ideal of learning not to see race or color in an attempt to eliminate personal prejudices and to promote a level playing field" ([  ], p. 250). However, as CRT theorists explain, color-blindness as a form of equality forgoes the salience of racism as an ordinary occurrence in American society. Notions of color-blindness do not account for the long-standing radicalized stigma and discriminatory practices that are all too commonplace for black America. To illustrate, in March 2016, a 22-year-old interview with a top President Nixon advisor, John Ehrlichman, was released in which he confesses that the initialization of the 1970s War on Drugs was a diversion tactic designed to camouflage the administration's efforts to attack its two perceived enemies: the radical antiwar left and black people ([10]). Ehrlichman stated the following during his 1994 interview: · We [the Nixon administration] knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.... Did we know we were lying about drugs? Of course we did. ([10]) The War on Drugs in the 1970s and 1980s contributed significantly to the proliferation of racial profiling in law enforcement. In the early 1970s to combat the illegal drug trade, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) compiled an informal profile of the "typical drug courier." The profile was based on behavioral characteristics such as the following: Did the person pay for his ticket with cash, did the person depart from a place considered to be the origin of illegal drugs, and so on ([33]). Explicitly, the race or ethnicity of the person had very little significance in the profile. However, in the early 1980s, when the crack cocaine market exploded, skin color alone became a major profile component ([19]). As a part of the campaign to combat drugs, the DEA implemented Operation Pipeline. The program required DEA agents to train local and state law enforcement personnel around the country to explicitly use race as a basis for highway stops ([18]). As a result of the training, black and Hispanic individuals became synonymous with the illegal drug trade and blackness became an indicator of criminality, further nurturing the growing stigmatization of black men. Controversy surrounding racial profiling highlights the role of race and racism in the area of social policy ([29]). A basic assumption from a racism-centered perspective is that a key function of American social policy development and implementation is social control. The policies and practices that emerge from the underlying assumption of social control are understood as having regulatory intentions and results that aim to monitor and change the behavior of those deemed socially deviant or politically threatening ([35]). From this viewpoint, social policies are instruments that enforce the cultural norms and mores of dominant groups among those who demonstrate nonconformity. Applying a racism-centered framework to the examination of racial profiling helps to elucidate the institution of law enforcement as a primary avenue through which white racial hegemony is sustained as a form of social control within the United States ([30]). Critical to an understanding of this perspective is the idea that racial regulation is an important focus and thrust of American social policy ([29]; [35]). From this perspective, black male youths are deemed socially deviant and politically threatening and that, if left unchecked, their potential empowerment could upset the stability of the predominantly white power structure in the United States ([12]). [30] contended that when the state becomes racialized it likewise becomes the "political arm of White racial hegemony" (p. 23). From this lens, the state is assumed to protect and promote the political, economic, and cultural interests of white people relative to other racial and ethnic groups. A racism-centered perspective supports the tenets of CRT, which maintains that social and political relations in the United States are augmented by historic and endemic racism. As [  ] opined, "Because racism is ordinary and embedded, its structural functions and effect on our ways of thinking are often invisible, particularly to people holding racial privilege" (p. 253). In turn, this "invisibility" "maintains racism." In reference to racial profiling and the notions of legal justice, in general, proponents of CRT assert that "analysis of the law cannot be neutral and objective and stresses that recognition of and voices from standpoint and race consciousness are essential to radical racial reform" ([  ], p. 250). Stigmatization has played a major role in the racial profiling of black men. The stigmatization of black men in America as violent and dangerous, indolent, nonachieving, and criminal has created a context in which many black men, particularly those of low-income status, are viewed as suspicious in a variety of social encounters ([13]; [42]). As a form of social identity, stigma is socially constructed and has been referred to as a virtual social identity whereby one is viewed as deviant, flawed, and having an attribute that deeply discredits the individual. As such, individuals must overcome these attributes to be socially accepted. Black male stigma is a product of implicit racial bias, which is the act of consciously rejecting discrimination and stereotypes while holding unconscious negative associations about other people ([25]). Given the narrative of color-blindness, many people do not see their views about race as discriminatory or as erroneous assumptions ([13]; [25]). To support negative assumptions about black men, people often form opinions based on their ongoing negative portrayal in the American media, where young black men are a target of fear, anger, stereotyping, misunderstanding, and rejection ([27]; [31]). Implicit racial bias related to black male stigma is further promoted by the selective boosting of a host of social science statistics as evidence of black indolence—particularly those surrounding family structure ([  ]). However, the general catalyst producing the plight of many urban black communities today started in the 1970s with deindustrialization, white flight, geographic redlining, and divestment in urban communities; this created structural inequalities and the resulting high unemployment and underemployment for black men that continues today ([26]; [42]). Over 50 percent of black male individuals of working age are unemployed in urban dwellings, and over 50 percent of black adolescents are unemployed; many more attend failing public schools that have become part of the school-to-prison pipeline ([27]). At present, the socialization experience of far too many black male youths is fraught with pervasive poverty and a poor educational experience, leading to reduced opportunities and life in the bottom tier of the socioeconomic ladder ([26]; [27]; [42]). The clear and present danger of black male stigmatization in America is its day-to-day functioning as an ingrained narrative in the psyche of America ([  ]). Black male stigma was well at play in the Trayvon Martin narrative, as witnessed by the characterization of Martin by the legal defense team during the trail ([25]). The presuppositions were set long before his encounter with George Zimmerman. Suspiciously pursued and armed with the sidewalk (a piece of concrete was literally brought into the courtroom by the defense attorney during the trial), Martin was transformed by the embodiment of black male stigma—based on his very existence—from the extended rights of his American citizenship, in simply walking down the street, to a hood-wearing attacker who lashed out and assaulted citizen George Zimmerman. According to the narrative, Zimmerman had the right to stand his ground with a concealed weapon and the legal right to probe, even after a request by law enforcement to discontinue his pursuit of Martin. At the outset of the trial, race was disavowed as the judge declared that "she intended to run a colorblind trial and did not want either side to call attention to race" ([25], p. 9). Consequently, in playing fast and loose with a myriad of negative stereotypes, a local jury, and a national audience, the defense attorney depicted the 17-year-old 158-pound Trayvon Martin as "a violent gangbanger" on the attack, while casting the 200-pound Zimmerman simultaneously as "both victim and protector of the unruly street" ([41], p. 21). Clearly, the rub on injustice is not only the not-guilty verdict rendered in the George Zimmerman trial, but the fact that Trayvon Martin was at once classified as a criminal by default, even as he was the victim of unnecessary and lethal violence. According to legal scholar and activist Patricia Williams, the attempt was to "resurrect" Trayvon Martin during the trial "as the active principal in his own death" ([41], p. 18). Any approach to social work practice with black families experiencing racial profiling must consist of an awareness of the general differences in perceptions between white Americans and black Americans on the very notion of profiling based on race. For example, a 1999 national Gallup poll revealed that 42 percent of black Americans as compared with 6 percent of European Americans "reported having been stopped by police on the basis of skin color" ([20], p. 396). The Zimmerman verdict of not guilty produced similar results. A July 2013 study by the Pew Research Center (PRC) revealed a nearly even 39 percent satisfied and 42 percent dissatisfied opinion on the verdict by white Americans. However, black Americans significantly differed in their reaction to the case and its meaning, with only 5 percent satisfied and an overwhelming 86 percent dissatisfied with "Zimmerman's acquittal in the death of Trayvon Martin" ([17], p. 1). Only 28 percent of white people surveyed viewed the case as an important issue about race, whereas 78 percent of black people viewed the case as an important issue about race. The 1999 Gallup poll and the July 2013 PRC study provide examples of differing perspectives on the salience of racial profiling between white and black Americans. These data further indicate the need for greater public awareness and education on the implications and seriousness that racial profiling inflicts on minority populations. As a response, and based on knowledge of structural inequalities that underlie the plight of many minority communities, institutions that espouse social justice should generate public awareness and attention concerning the reality and impact of racialized practices on minority populations. "Racial profiling, workplace discrimination, health disparity, and daily exposure to microaggressions are factors that affect the emotional well-being of [many] African American men" ([  ], p. 20). Continued emphasis should be placed on the need to consider a racism-centered perspective as important to addressing the issue of racial profiling with black male clients. A race-centered perspective provides a more in-depth focus on the role that race plays in social inequality and injustice, and "helps explain why people of color have disproportionately experienced injustices" ([35], p. 126). Take for example the [35] report released in March [35], generated in the aftermath of the killing of an unarmed black man, Michael Brown, by Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson in August 2014. The report noted that the city of Ferguson disproportionately ticketed and arrested black people and gave them more citations when stopped compared with white people. As stated within the report, "city and police leadership pressure officers to write citations, independent of any public safety need, and rely on citation productivity to fund the City budget" ([38], p. 10). Furthermore, the report cites that these discriminatory practices created years of racial animosity between the police and the black community. What social workers should know is that given such experiences, many black men are reluctant to engage in intervention with practitioners who cannot identify with their experiences; therefore, they are less likely to engage in clinical intervention ([  ]). "Stigma, fear, and distrust are additional barriers that prevent Black men from availing themselves of therapeutic services" ([  ], p. 20). The social and psychological deprivation that many black men experience based on profiling and other poor interactions with law enforcement breeds a sense of distrust, making the establishment of rapport difficult—particularly in working with clinicians who do not acknowledge their experiences ([32]). When black male clients feel marginalized, it presents a challenge to clinicians who must understand and be sensitive to their needs. Although no panacea, [  ] suggested the need for clinicians of the same ethnic background to work with black male clients who have experienced racial profiling. However, a lack of research by the profession in this area leaves most social work practitioners at a disadvantage when working with black male clients who experience racial profiling and other discriminatory practices. As such, [  ] warned against the assumption that those from the same cultural group will naturally foster an intraracial therapeutic relationship, and called for an examination of the complexities among class, gender, and race as important elements in therapy to consider between a black male client and a black clinician. Implications for clinical practice with black male clients who experience the challenge of racial profiling are important to consider. First, acknowledging that racial profiling is a clear and present occurrence is important, and that those who experience such an occurrence may experience psychological trauma and other complications. As part of the biopsychosocial assessment process, social work practitioners working with black male clients should have a critical perspective that focuses on the intersection among power, unintended racial bias, "the centrality of race and racism and their intersection with other forms of subordination" ([23], p. 170). A basic tenet of CRT is the "insight that racism is normal, not aberrant, in American society" ([23], p. 169). Thus, clinicians working with black male clients must gain a sense of their lived experience in operating in a society where stigma and implicit bias are commonplace. From a CRT perspective, "the problem is that ignoring racial difference can actually exacerbate the effects of implicit racial bias" ([25]). Therefore, in the clinical setting, acknowledging that the notion of color-blindness is often to the disadvantage of black male clients may garner greater client rapport and cooperation. The use of relationship, a known factor in therapeutic practice with black clients ([40]), is enhanced when practitioners acknowledge the lived experience of black male clients. As a way of engaging in social justice work, social work education programs and universities can work with local agencies and organizations within communities that have histories of racial profiling and poor relationships with local law enforcement personnel. A host of projects are now underway. For example, following the Ferguson Police Department Report by the [38] citing widespread discrimination in policing tactics, the Clock Tower Accords project was conceptualized and launched as a community outreach project by Saint Louis University (SLU). University stakeholders including trustees, administration, faculty, staff and student organizations, local government, and civic organizations all played a part in the planning and development of the project. Several working groups were developed to plan and tackle local community and neighborhood concerns such as community economic empowerment; recruitment and retention of students of color within the university; and the planning of a national conference on race, poverty, and inequality. SLU has invested in the Clock Tower Accords as a method of progressively addressing issues of diversity, inclusion, race, poverty, and community and university relations. In another example—and developing out of the spirit of the Black Lives Matter movement—the Race, Equity, Accountability, and Leadership (REAL) project was launched in Austin, Texas, by a group of local social work activists. In September 2016, this group of young social work professionals successfully petitioned the … The methodological struggles of racial profiling research: a causal question that automobile stop data has yet to answer. Authors: Fallik, Seth Wyatt 1 Source: Criminal Justice Studies . Mar2019, Vol. 32 Issue 1, p32-49. 18p. Document Type: Article Subject Terms: RACIAL profiling in law enforcement DECISION making PUBLIC officers AUTOMOBILE driving DATA analysis Author-Supplied Keywords: causality Driving While Black (DWB) officer decision-making Racial   profiling Abstract: Automobile stop research finds that citizen race influences officer decision-making. Researchers, however, report methodological issues inhibiting them from drawing causal inferences about the existence of racial profiling. The purpose of this study is to deconstruct this field of inquiry through a causal lens to inform the next generation of scholarship. Through an analysis of automobile stop data, temporal ordering issues are exposed. Relating to association, most studies find that racial minorities are more likely to be searched, however, spuriousness issues continue to plague racial profiling studies as researchers rarely estimate departmental, passenger, vehicle, and temporal variables. To confront these issues, researchers are encouraged to engage in primary data collection and explore recent statistical innovations in their analytical strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]   Copyright of Criminal Justice Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.) Author Affiliations: 1School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, College of Design and Social Inquiry, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA Full Text Word Count: 7874 ISSN: 1478-601X DOI: 10.1080/1478601X.2018.1558057 Accession Number: 134137519 Database: Criminal Justice Abstracts with Full Text Publisher Logo:    The methodological struggles of racial profiling research: a causal question that automobile stop data has yet to answer  Contents 1. Introduction 2. The causal question for potential data sources 3. The officer decision-making process in automobile stops 4. Demonstrating causality in automobile stops 5. Temporal order 6. Association 7. The current study's selection criteria 8. Association results 9. Spuriousness 10. Analytical strategies and theoretically derived confounding factors 11. The current study's coding scheme 12. Spuriousness results 13. Legal 14. Extralegal 15. Policing 16. Officer 17. Departmental 18. Ecological 19. Situational 20. Driver 21. Passengers 22. Vehicle 23. Temporal 24. Additive probabilities 25. Discussion 26. Inherent barriers and policy implications 27. Narrowly constructed analytical strategies 28. Static secondary data analyses 29. Limitations and areas of future research 30. Conclusion 31. Notes 32. Disclosure statement 33. References Full Text Listen                     Automobile stop research finds that citizen race influences officer decision-making. Researchers, however, report methodological issues inhibiting them from drawing causal inferences about the existence of racial profiling. The purpose of this study is to deconstruct this field of inquiry through a causal lens to inform the next generation of scholarship. Through an analysis of automobile stop data, temporal ordering issues are exposed. Relating to association, most studies find that racial minorities are more likely to be searched, however, spuriousness issues continue to plague racial profiling studies as researchers rarely estimate departmental, passenger, vehicle, and temporal variables. To confront these issues, researchers are encouraged to engage in primary data collection and explore recent statistical innovations in their analytical strategies. Keywords: Racial profiling; Driving While Black (DWB); officer decision-making; causality Introduction As the gatekeepers to the criminal justice system, police officers have a unique role in the administration of justice. Their enforcement practices have a ripple effect throughout the criminal justice system. Recently, however, confidence in law enforcement has been shaken in the wake of national incidents involving police use of force against racial[  1 ] minorities in the United States of America (Newport, 2016). In the last three decades, depictions of potential racial animus have prompted data explorations of law enforcement practices. Departmental transparency, according to the President's Task Force on twenty-first Century Policing (2015), is critical to citizen assessments of public trust and legitimacy; these analyses, therefore, are highly consequential to law enforcement (Tyler & Wakslak, 2004). Unfortunately, studies examining the differential treatment of racial minorities during automobile stops tend to find that citizen race influences officer decision-making. Researchers, notwithstanding, have reported a host of methodological issues that have inhibited them from drawing reliable causal inferences about the existence of racial profiling. Even researchers employing quantitative syntheses of this literature, such as meta-analyses, recognize that the explanatory limits of their findings are confined by the quality of available studies. Consequently, the etiology of the 'driving while Black' phenomenon, as it is also known, remains elusive and a well of skepticism has perpetuated a divide among police and the communities they serve. The purpose of the current study is to deconstruct this field of inquiry through a causal lens so that researchers are conscious of the methodological issues that must be contended with going forward. The topics presented in this manuscript are reoccurring issues discussed in individual racial profiling studies, but by evaluating the logical consistency of automobile stop events, assessing the relationship between citizen race and the search disposition, and observing how researchers control for exogenous influences, the current study seeks to present a succinct accounting of the causal issues that have plagued racial profiling research. In doing so, the discussion focuses on how to bridge persistent methodological gaps and advance our understandings of officer decision-making. To set the stage for this discussion, this manuscript begins by contextualizing the causal question of racial profiling among potential data sources and describing the officer decision-making process in automobile stops. The causal question for potential data sources Racial profiling inquiries are a causal question at their root. It hypothesizes that if law enforcement harbor implicit or explicit animus toward racial minorities, it will manifest in discriminatory outcomes. As a counterfactual model, racial profiling research asks if automobile stop outcomes would differ if officers acted absent racial animus. While the most direct measure of this causal model would seem to be officer self-reports, there are serious ethical and methodological concerns that are difficult, if not impossible, for researchers to overcome with this type of data. Racial animus, therefore, is often explored with aggregates of police-citizen encounters. In these studies, researchers must construct what constitutes equitable treatment in their analyses (Reitzel & Piquero, 2006). The selections researchers make represent statistical, rather than behavioral, differentiations; thus, disparity, rather than animus, is the preferred nomenclature in this body of literature. While the causal model for observing disparity is similar to animus, readers of this research should avoid the assumption that what is true of the whole must be true of the parts. Aggregating police-citizen encounters has allowed researchers to generalize their results among neighborhood, city, state, highway, and national samples. Unfortunately, pooled data are removed from the individualized nature of police-citizen encounters. Readers, therefore, should be cautious in making generalizations to specific officers. The officer decision-making process in automobile stops To further elaborate on the causal model found in racial profiling studies, researchers have deconstructed the officer decision-making process of automobile stop encounters. Officer-initiated decision-making points are of particular interest to racial profiling researchers because they provide measurable aspects to the 'cognitive processes that underlie [officer] discretion' (Miller, 2008, p. 127). Researchers have, therefore, strategically focused on more discretionary automobile stop outcomes in which racial disparity is most likely to be pronounced. With this in mind, there are three prominent opportunities to observe officer use of discretion within automobile stop data, including the decision to (  1 ) initiate a stop, (  2 ) conduct a search, and (  3 ) apply a sanction (Schafer, Carter, Katz-Bannister, & Wells, 2006). The decision to initiate a stop precedes all other decision-making points and researchers of this disposition typically consider the likelihood of racial minorities to be stopped by law enforcement. Researchers in these studies would ideally compare those who are stopped against the population that is not stopped to determine if there is a disparity in officer decision-making. Unfortunately, automobile stop data only reflect the former, which has forced researchers to put forth proximate, non-exact measures for the driving and/or traffic offending population. Benchmarks, as they are more commonly known, offer a solution to what has been called the 'denominator problem' (Schafer et al., 2006, p. 187). Prior research has utilized, for example, population-based and accident rate estimates, field observations, and internal benchmarks built on the pool of motorist's stopped as the denominator. Identifying an appropriate benchmark has become a hotly contested debate in the racial profiling literature, due to the transient nature of the population attempting to be measured and methodological implications for each benchmark (Tillyer, Engel, & Cherauskas, 2009). Unfortunately, side-by-side comparisons of benchmark outcomes have yet to be explored in the extant literature, inhibiting discussions about their empirical strengths and weaknesses. The second officer-initiated decision-making point occurs post-stop and is concerned with an officer's decision to search the driver, vehicle, passengers, or a combination of some or all three entities. Most research in this area asks if racial minorities are disproportionately searched by law enforcement. More discriminate efforts disaggregate searches by types and tend to focus on more discretionary search types within the search disposition (e.g. Pickerill, Mosher, & Pratt, 2009). This allows researchers to collapse similarly situated instances of officer discretion into more generalizable results with greater statistical power but does not compromise the granularity of the analyses. The final officer-initiated decision-making point also occurs post-stop and is concerned with the sanctions issued to the citizen by the officer. The bulk of this research evaluates who is arrested by law enforcement; however, citations are the most common occurrence at this decision-making point (Langton & Durose, 2013). Other sanction-related analyses have considered more punitive or coercive outcomes, including instances of physical and verbal resistance and officer use of non-deadly and deadly force (Withrow, 2006). Demonstrating causality in automobile stops Regardless of which disposition is being observed, establishing a causal relationship between citizen race and officer decision-making in automobile stop data hinges on three critical factors: temporal order, association, and spuriousness (Kraska & Neuman, 2012). In the sections that follow, racial profiling research is discussed among each of these factors. The current study begins by describing and assessing the logical consistency of an automobile stop's timing. The associative relationship between citizen race and the search disposition is then evaluated among systematically identified studies. An analysis of the control variables employed in each of these studies follows. Finally, the manuscript concludes by drawing attention to inherent issues in racial profiling analytical strategies and automobile stop data. Temporal order Temporal order refers to the arrangement of events in time. It necessitates that a causal factor is preceded in time by the outcome. Two temporal ordering issues are prominent in the racial profiling literature. First, establishing temporal order in automobile stop data is relatively easy for post-stop dispositions. For post-stop decision-making points, officers have an opportunity to observe the race of the citizen prior to searching and sanctioning; however, establishing temporal order in stop initiation research is more difficult. Alpert, Dunham, and Smith (2007), for example, found that officers of the Miami-Dade (Florida) Police Department 'could only determine the race of the driver prior to the stop approximately 30% of the time' (p. 48). If an officer does not know the race of the driver prior to making a stop, then it cannot be the reason for the stop. In any case, stops with racial bias may be diluted by the overwhelming majority of encounters in which the citizen's race could not be determined prior to the stop. The second temporal ordering issue affects post-stop dispositions. A stop's initiation will always be the first decision-making point in the temporal chain of events of an automobile stop because without which there cannot be subsequent officer dispositions. Unfortunately, the temporal ordering of searches and sanctions are often not specified in automobile stop data (Withrow, 2006). This is problematic for researchers who seek to understand the larger cognitive processes that tie decision-making points together. More specifically, the temporal ordering of post-stop dispositions tells researchers something about the conditions in which the officer acted. If, for example, a suspect was arrested then searched, it suggests a less discretionary search occurred and vice versa. An inability to disentangle the temporal ordering of searches and sanctions has relegated racial profiling research to measure automobile stop data cross-sectionally, which is inconsistent with the processes that underlie officer decision-making. Association Once the temporal order is established, an association must be made between the hypothesized cause and effect. The cause (i.e. citizen race) and effect (i.e. disparate outcomes) in racial profiling research is fairly overt because this relationship, as was noted previously, is often on display in news media. Incidents involving the deaths of Walter Scott and Philando Castile during automobile stops have brought racial profiling to the forefront of the nation's consciousness. In fact, attitudinal research finds that minorities are more critical of police behavior and often report feelings of harassment and discrimination (Reitzel & Piquero, 2006). Unfortunately, news media and attitudinal research only provide anecdotal associative evidence. Likewise, attitudinal research assumes that citizen feelings are a direct reflection of their contacts with law enforcement. Rather, in any given year, only about a quarter (26.6%) of the eligible driving population will encounter a police officer according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (Langan & Durose, 2013). Though racial minorities are disproportionately found among these contacts, indirect experiences are often more salient in shaping perceptions of police. As Rosenbaum, Schuck, Costello, Hawkins, and Ring (2005) reported, vicarious knowledge is the most important predictor of citizen attitudes of law enforcement. Negative police-citizen encounters, they noted, are likely to reverberate among family, friends, and communities; thus, attitudinal research is likely to overestimate the presence of actual racial animus.[  2 ] The current study's selection criteria To better estimate the associative relationship between citizen race and officer decision-making, several studies have employed quantitative analyses of police-citizen encounters. To identify relevant research, the current study utilizes the sample of studies reviewed by Bolger (2014). In his meta-analysis of officer decision-making correlates, 60 potential studies were identified in a thorough exploration of the literature. Bolger (2014) first searched computerized databases utilizing the following boolean search terms: (police OR law enforcement OR officer) AND (search OR force). The computerized databases included in his search were 'Academic Search Complete, Academic Search Premier, Criminal Justice Abstracts, Proquest Criminal Justice, Proquest Dissertation and Theses, Proquest Research Library, Psychology and Behavioral Science Collection, Psyc INFO, Psyc INFO Historic, Soc Index, and Social Sciences Citations' (p. 50). Second, the reference sections from prominent literature reviews in policing, including Sherman (1980), Riksheim and Chermak (1993), and the National Research Council (2004), were also included into the pool of potential studies. Third, the reference sections from each of the aforementioned studies were sourced. Finally, in an attempt to overcome the 'File Drawer Problem' that inflates effect sizes from publication bias against null findings, he also included unpublished manuscripts by searching the American Society of Criminology and Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences annual convention programs and contacting the authors of potential studies. To hone in on applicable studies, he excluded research (  1 ) published before 1960 and after 2013, (  2 ) drawn on non-patrol officer samples, (  3 ) analyzed at the macro-level, (  4 ) that employed only univariate and/or bivariate analytical strategies, and (  5 ) without sufficient statistical information to calculate effect sizes. Bolger (2014) also focused on the search disposition. Unlike stops and sanctions, searches operate with the least visibility to external and internal forms of scrutiny (Fallik & Novak, 2012). Documented sanctions, for example, are only applied in search encounters where contraband is discovered. Consequently, if racial profiling exists in automobile stops, it will be most noticeable in the search disposition. Substantively, Bolger's (2014) sample represents the most exhaustive search of automobile stop studies that aligns with the purpose of these analyses. Association results The associative results from the 12 studies reviewed by Bolger (2014) and explored in the current study are presented in Figure 1.[  3 ] When looking at the figure in its totality, the bulk of the studies (n = 9, 75%) found that racial minorities are more likely to be searched during their encounters with law enforcement.[  4 ] Although this is consistent with the prior research, studies published in the last five years appear to be less consistent with this finding. The appearance of racial disparity and its somewhat recent dissipating effects may be attributable to the final and often most difficult to prove causal issue: spuriousness. PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 1. Associative research results on racial minority likelihood of being searched. Spuriousness A spurious relationship exists when two factors are associated but the relationship is non-causal because a third and unobserved factor, often referred to as a confounding factor, is responsible for the association. To establish that a relationship is nonspurious, researchers must eliminate rival explanations and/or hypotheses. Engaging in falsification, as it is also known, is a difficult task because officer decision-making is not unidimensional. In an attempt to disentangle these effects, researchers have employed a variety of analytical strategies. Analytical strategies and theoretically derived confounding factors The most basic analytical strategy found among racial profiling studies are bivariate analyses. The explanatory power of bivariate analyses is limited because within unit differences may confound the results. To this point, Withrow (2006) insisted that bivariate analyses 'cannot be used to infer or predict and generally cannot account for intervening causes of police behavior' (p. 193). Although a limitless number of factors may contribute to an officer's decision-making, the inclusion of additional variables in multivariate models is only as good as their explanatory value because the inclusion of irrelevant factors does not provide greater causal elaboration, nor does it withstand falsification challenges. Omitted influences, however, can badly bias parameter estimates and obfuscate existing but small effects. Theoretically derived confounding factors in racial profiling research have been organized according to their legal and extralegal influence in the extant literature (Lundman, 2004). Extralegal factors have been further distinguished into policing (i.e. officer and departmental influences), ecological, and situational typologies. Finally, driver, passenger, vehicle, and temporal characteristics of police-citizen encounters have also been differentiated among situational influences (see Figure 2). PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 2. Organization of confounding factor typologies in racial profiling research. The current study's coding scheme To explore the prevalence of theoretically derived confounding factors, the variables employed by the studies found in Figure 1 were coded using the typologies found in Figure 2. To ensure classification consistency, variables from each of the studies were independently coded among two analysts. The initial coding procedure produced 89.3% coding agreement. Where differences were observed, analysts discussed and came to an agreement about how the items should be coded with 100% consistency.[  5 ] Spuriousness results There does not appear to be a relationship between the type or number of confounding factors included among these studies and the associative relationship found between driver race and the search disposition; however, the inclusion of control variables is sporadic (see Table 1). In fact, the racial profiling research observed in the current study employed on average fewer than 20 control variables ( = 19.8; not depicted) from a limited number of the nine theoretically derived typologies ( = 5; not depicted). Studies from the last 5 years of the sample tended to employ a greater number of variables ( = 21; not depicted) from a wider variety of the theoretically derived typologies ( = 5.6; not depicted). Subsequent sections go deeper into the types and effects of variables employed in this body of research. The number of variables observed from each variable typology among racial profiling studies estimating the officer decisions to search the driver, vehicle, passengers, or a combination of some or all three entities. Article Sample size Race association Legal Extralegal Additive Other Total Policing Ecological Situational Officer Department Driver Passenger Vehicle Temporal Antonvics and Knight (2009) 70,652 Positive 1 1 1 6 1 10 Briggs (2007) 9989 Positive 3 9 5 15 32 Engel and Calnon (2004) 19,277,002 Positive 7 2 2 8 1 2 2 24 Farrell, McDevitt, Bailey, Andersen, and Pierce (2004) 442,873 Positive 1 1 4 1 3 10 Lovrich et al. (2005) 1,102,529 Positive 1 2 2 8 1 14 Lundman (2004) 7034 Positive 7 4 4 9 2 7 33 Pickerill et al. (2009) 677,514 Positive 1 6 8 6 1 9 31 Schafer et al. (2006) 61,037 Positive 3 3 6 Tillyer et al. (2011) 43,707 Positive 7 5 3 7 1 2 3 1 29 Fallik and Novak (2012) 4569 Non-Significant 6 1 6 1 14 Paoline and Terrill (2005) 549 Non-Significant 3 5 1 5 14 Rydberg and Terrill (2010) 3356 Non-Significant 6 6 1 1 6 1 21 Total n = 12 46 31 1 33 73 5 2 10 34 3 Legal A legal variable was found in all of the studies listed in Table 1 (n = 12, 100.0%). Officers are legal actors influenced by legal forces, which explains why legal variables are often found in racial profiling literature (National Research Council, 2004). Accordingly, many researchers noted that the legal reason for a stop was the most important factor when attempting to understand automobile stop outcomes because the cause of the stop often dictates the scope of discretion afforded to officers (Engel, 2008). Investigatory stops, for example, function as part of a continuing investigation and are encounters where the driver, passengers, vehicle, or combination of some or all entities is known to police. In an investigatory stop, police may encounter someone who has not violated a traffic law but fits the description of a suspect, witness, or vehicle involved in a crime. These stops are an example of proactive policing and, are, therefore, qualitatively different in their presumed presence of racial bias. Traffic stops, for example, may be presumed to be racially neutral (see the 'Temporal Order' subsection), while investigatory stops may not. Even though investigatory stops may be initiated with different knowledge of the driver's race, hypothetically, their post-stop dispositions should be absent racial disparity if selection bias, which occurs during the stops' initiation, is controlled. Unfortunately, this type of sampling error is often overlooked by many racial profiling researchers. Perhaps equally important to the cause of the stop is the inclusion of factors relating to the offense severity and the quantity of evidence against the citizen. Engel and Calnon (2004) and Withrow (2006) report that as the severity of the offense and/or the amount of evidence of wrongdoing increases, officer discretion decreases and procedural/departmental policies become more influential on an officer's decision-making. As such, legal factors are critical to understanding officer use of discretion. Substantively, without considering the legal conditions of automobile stops, the influence of citizen race may be obscured. In Table 1, however, there is no a pattern with the presence, number, or type of legal variables employed and the associative relationship observed between citizen race and the search disposition. Extralegal Turning now to non-legal factors: there are three distinct types of extralegal factors (i.e. policing, ecological, and situational) identified in the racial profiling literature. Policing Each encounter brings together people from unique backgrounds and policing variables suggest that these encounters may differ across officer and departmental characteristics (Batton & Kadleck, 2004). Officer Two thirds (n = 8, 66.7%) of the studies found in Table 1 evaluated the race, ethnicity, gender, age, years of service, and/or educational achievement of the officer involved in the search. The National Research Council (2004), on this topic, reported that officer variables tend to yield mixed, insufficient, or no influence on officer decision-making. This sentiment is echoed by the studies found in Table 1 (not depicted). Furthermore, the inclusion, number, or type of officer-related factors does not appear to influence the associative relationship observed between the driver's race and the search disposition. Departmental In addition to officer characteristics, differential departmental priorities may influence the types of persons encountered by law enforcement. To this point, organizational theorists posit that the actions of the individual officer are a reflection of formal and informal policing policies (Crank & Langworthy, 1992). Batton and Kadleck (2004), for example, contended that researchers should consider the department's mission as it impacts 'the time, energy, and resources allotted to various aspects of law enforcement' (p. 50). Within this context, it is highly likely that departmental tools, like 'hot spot' and 'problem-oriented' policing, will differentially impact officer deployments. In this example, disparity may result from more time spent in minority communities and not individual officer animus (Alpert et al., 2007). Departmental factors suggest that racial disparity - if it exists - is a 'blue' issue. Unfortunately, nearly all of the studies in Table 1 failed to consider departmental characteristics as a confounding influence upon officer decision-making (n = 1, 8.3%)[  6 ] and, thus, it remains largely unclear how departmental priorities impact officer decision-making. Ecological Ecological factors have also been found to influence an officer's decision-making. While most of the studies found in Table 1 employed at least one ecological variable (n = 11, 91.7%), there was little consistency in the types of variables utilized and only two variables were used in multiple studies: street type and community characteristics. Relating to street type, police-citizen encounters on highways are typically the result of a traffic violation. Alternatively, surface streets provide an extra opportunity for community engagement. As a result, researchers expect officer discretion to be different in these context. Likewise, police discretion may vary based on community characteristics. The variables used to measure community contexts tend to overlap with the measures found in social disorganization and collective efficacy research (e.g. Sampson, Raudenbush, & Earls, 1997). Unfortunately, racial profiling research has yet to fully understand how communities influence officer decision-making. Klinger (1997), for example, reported that officers working in higher crime communities are more lenient with their enforcement practices than their peers in lower crime communities. Though he attributed differences to policing factors, his ecological theory of police responses to deviance suggests that the brink of police use of authority is distinguished by community crime levels and not the racial identity of citizen who has been stopped or racial composition of the community. While Klinger's (1997) results are somewhat racially neutral, the theory of contextual attentiveness suggests something different. Withrow (2006) reported that officers may act 'differentially attentive toward individuals or behaviors that appear inconsistent with predetermined conceptualizations' (p. 127). An officer's suspicion becomes heightened, Withrow (2006) noted, when a citizen's racial identity is inconsistent with the neighborhood context in which he or she is found. Race 'out of place' policing, as it is more commonly known, is most evident when a Caucasian citizen is encountered in a predominantly Black neighborhood or when a Black citizen is encountered in a predominantly Caucasian neighborhood. Unfortunately, the extant literature provides mixed evidence of this phenomenon (Meehan & Ponder, 2002; Novak & Chamlin, 2008). In any case, failure to include ecological factors may inflate the influence of citizen race on automobile stop dispositions. In Table 1, however, there does not appear to be a pattern between the inclusion, number, or type of ecological factors employed in racial profiling research and the associative relationship found between the driver's race and the search disposition. Situational The final type of extralegal variables found in the racial profiling literature are situational. Situational factors are important to officer decision-making because, like the theory of contextual attentiveness, officers may perceive some drivers, passengers, vehicles, and/or temporal factors with greater suspicion. Driver All of the research found in Table 1 (n = 12, 100.0%) included some demographic information on the driver being searched, including the driver's race, ethnicity,[  7 ] gender, and age; however, more rigorous racial profiling analyses have included the driver's socioeconomic status (SES), educational achievement, and demeanor. Similar to racial minorities, ethnic minorities, males, younger citizens, citizens of lower SES, and persons with low educational achievement tend to be overrepresented at every stage of the criminal justice system and, as a result, the presence of these driver characteristics may independently influence officer decision-making. On the issue of driver demeanor, many researchers believe that disrespectful citizens are more likely to receive punitive sanctions during their encounters with police. The studies found in Table 1 fail to support this contention as none of the studies observing citizen demeanor (n = 3) found significant associations with the search disposition (not depicted). Furthermore, there does not appear to be a relationship between the inclusion, number, or type of driver variables and the associative relationship between the driver's race and the search disposition. Passengers Passengers are equally susceptible to racial profiling and require the same due diligence in data collection and analyses. More specifically, Withrow (2006) suggested that the number of occupants in the vehicle and their demographic characteristics may be as critical as driver characteristics in understanding officer decision-making. Although information about drivers are found in most racial profiling studies (see Table 1), researchers have poorly accounted for their passengers (n = 4, 33.3%). In fact, the only time that passengers were accounted for among the identified studies was if there were passengers in the vehicle at the time of the police-citizen encounter. None of the studies included demographic information for passengers and, therefore, it remains largely unclear on how passenger characteristics impact officer decision-making. Vehicle The vehicle transporting the driver and passengers is an outwardly visible factor vulnerable to bias according to some researchers. Batton and Kadleck (2004) asserted that vehicle characteristics, such as make, model, color, year, and modifications, may influence officer decision-making. Two vehicle factors were examined in the sample by Tillyer, Klahm, and Engel (2011): vehicle age and the presence of a vehicle defect. The vehicle's age was unrelated to officer decision-making but the presence of a vehicle defect increased the likelihood of a search (not depicted). Vehicle defects provide legal grounds for officers to initiate a stop if the defect poses a safety concern for motorists; however, an officer's decision to conduct a search should not be influenced by vehicle defects. Unfortunately, this finding was beyond the scope of Tillyer et al.'s (2011) objectives and was not discussed further. The overwhelming majority of these studies, however, did not estimate vehicle effects (n = 1, 8.3%) and, therefore, their influence on officer decision-making remains unknown. Temporal Temporal factors consider when a police-citizen encounter transpired. The only reoccurring temporal factor found in Table 1 was based on the time of day the contact took place (i.e. day vs. night). Although the majority of stops are made during daylight hours, Barnum and Perfetti (2010) reported that younger officers often work nightshifts and are more likely to make arrests during their encounters with citizens. As such, there may be a confounding organizational influence on time of day observations. Other temporal considerations found among the studies in Table 1 included the day of the week (i.e. weekday vs. weekend), enforcement quota periods, and seasonal/weather effects (e.g. rainy vs. sunny days). Temporal factors tended to be underrepresented among the studies found in Table 1 (n = 6, 50.0%), which has also relegated their influence on officer decision-making unclear. Additive probabilities Finally, the presence of multiple risk factors may produce stronger associative results. It may be, for example, that citizen race is a nonsignificant predictor of officer decision-making. Separately, it may be determined that citizen age does not predict officer decision-making; however, persons who are both Black and under the age of 21 may be statistically more likely to be searched. Interaction variables, or additive probabilities as they are also known, demonstrate the complexity of police-citizen encounters. Interactive factors were utilized in five (41.7%) of the studies found in Table 1. Every study that considered additive probabilities combined driver race with other driver risk factors, such as age and gender. The inclusion of interaction variables tended to increase the likelihood of a significant associative result between the driver's race and the search disposition; however, this was not an absolute finding among the sampled studies and, therefore, warrants further exploration. Discussion National media coverage of police use of force against racial minorities has caused many to question the efficacy of law enforcement practices. To assuage fears of racial profiling, departments across the nation began collecting and disseminating explorations into law enforcement practices. Unfortunately, quantitative inquiries into automobile stop data have been plagued by methodological issues. This has done little to reassure citizens that law enforcement decision-making is transparent and procedurally fair. To inform the next generation of racial profiling scholarship, the current study deconstructed this body of literature through a causal lens. The causal question of racial profiling was first contextualized as disparity among aggregates of police-citizen encounters. Among potential data sources, researchers have further honed their efforts onto three officer-initiated and highly discretionary decision-making points in automobile stop encounters, including the decision to (  1 ) initiate a stop, (  2 ) conduct a search, and (  3 ) apply a sanction. This manuscript then presented these dispositions among the three criteria of causality: temporal order, association, and spuriousness. The logical consistency of two temporal ordering issues were discussed. First, many officers do not know the racial identity of the persons they have stopped (Alpert et al., 2007). Citizen race, therefore, is temporally inconsistent with research aimed at an officer's decision to initiate an automobile stop. Additionally, Withrow (2006) reported that the temporal ordering of the search and sanction dispositions are rarely specified in automobile stop data. This has relegated racial profiling research to be measured cross-sectionally, which is inconsistent with the officer decision-making process. The second criteria of causality (i.e. association) was distinguished in the current study from news media incidents and attitudinal research by evaluating the associative relationship between citizen race and the search disposition among systematically identified studies. Three-quarters of the studies sampled (n = 9, 75.0%) found that racial minorities were more likely to be searched by police (see Figure 1) but this relationship has somewhat dissipated among more contemporary studies due to the inclusion of a growing number and variety of theoretically derived confounding factors (see Table 1). Although studies published in the last half decade of the sample appear to be doing a better job at combating spuriousness, independent coding of theoretically derived confounding factors found that their inclusion in multivariate models is erratic as departmental, passenger, vehicle, and temporal considerations were nearly non-existent among the sampled studies. Inherent barriers and policy implications Based on these results and a reading of the available empirical literature, two barriers are inhibiting a greater understanding of the etiology of the racial profiling phenomenon: (  1 ) narrowly constructed analytical strategies and (  2 ) static secondary data analyses. Narrowly constructed analytical strategies Although the prior racial profiling literature has contributed greatly to initial understandings of the etiology of officer decision-making, we now know that their analytical strategies produce poor causal validity. Researchers, for example, have employed several benchmarks to estimate the driving and/or traffic offending population but none have compared how they impact automobile stop dispositions. Furthermore, studies employing multivariate modeling techniques have weakly attempted to eliminate spuriousness. Where suitable controls are lacking, recent innovations in causal effect estimations, such as propensity score matching, weighting, marginal meaning weighting, and instrumental variable estimators have been neglected by researchers. Even when adequate controls exist, many studies have not observed between unit differences in organizational and community characteristics, as is proposed by organizational theorists and the theory of contextual attentiveness. This is unfortunate, given the availability of hierarchical modeling techniques that can account for these structural relationships. Researchers have also been remiss in modeling the decision-making process. This is problematic because cross-sectional observations of officer decision-making may be misleading. Novak (2004), for example, found that minority drivers were more likely to be stopped by police but were no more likely to be sanctioned. Given the previous temporal ordering discussion and null findings with regards to the sanction disposition, Novak (2004) could have dismissed racial disparity among these police-citizen encounters; however, by considering these dispositions together, he was able to draw anecdotal conclusions about the officer decision-making process. Novak (2004) hypothesized that officers use minor traffic violations as a pretext to stop racial minorities more frequently, but with few stops producing legal grounds for a formal sanction, many racial minorities are released with only a warning. The conclusion to be drawn from Novak (2004) is that post-stop dispositions always involve some selection bias, whereby the population that is searched or sanctioned is always preselected to be stopped. Although citizen race may not directly influence a stop's initiation, it may be confounded in other factors that do. Modeling the decision-making process, therefore, requires researchers to collect data that distinguishes the temporal order of post-stop dispositions and allows them to estimate selection bias that can occur during a stop's initiation. Selection and structural equation modeling can be used to control for such biases, whereby officer decision-making points are controlled and/or measured simultaneously. Unfortunately, the decision-making process has yet to be modeled in racial profiling research. Static secondary data analyses In addition to narrowly constructed analytical strategies, racial profiling researchers typically make use of data that are collected by law enforcement for other purposes. Researchers select available data for a variety of reasons, including the lack of resources to conduct original data collection. The problem with this custom is that available data do not directly address the research questions being proposed by racial profiling researchers and, thus, are limited in their ability to engage in falsification. Given this predicament, much of the aforementioned racial profiling research suffers from specification error, which 'is a term used to describe situations in which multivariate models are misspecified due to [... the] inclusion of erroneous variables and/or the exclusion of unobserved variables' (Engel, 2008, p. 11). For our purposes, specification error causes two issues. First and foremost, it threatens our ability to draw associative inferences about race and officer decision-making because the observed associative relationships may be due to one of the many unobserved theoretically derived confounding factors discussed in Figure 2. Furthermore, specification error impacts statistical conclusion validity. When theoretically derived confounding factors are omitted from multivariate models, the weight of observed factors is likely inflated by unexplained variance. Most of the multivariate models in Figure 1, for example, had goodness of fit indices that fell far below chance (not depicted). Perhaps the most concerning element of racial profiling's academic-practitioner arrangements is the lack of adjustment. Simply put, knowledge on the etiology of officer decision-making has outgrown available data collection methods, yet many data collection strategies have not evolved. A push needs to be made to make use of our existing knowledge to better inform methodologically conceived and executed research studies. At a minimum, this would require evolving data collection instruments and ongoing collaborations with a host of stakeholders, including law enforcement, researchers, legislators, city/state executives, and community advocates. Limitations and areas of future research Racial profiling researchers have an ethical responsibility to identify and communicate the explanatory limits of their findings. That burden falls equally upon these analyses. First, the discussion of automobile stop temporal ordering was nonsystematic. Temporal ordering is best assessed informally by evaluating the logical consistency of an events timing. With regards to associative and spuriousness analyses, the studies under review in the current study were systematically analyzed but do not represent an exhaustive list of racial profiling research. This was due in part to Bolger's (2014) omission of more recent studies without sufficient statistical information. Although the exclusion of the latter studies was pertinent to his meta-analysis, this sampling criteria was beyond the scope of the current study. Nevertheless, a cursory search for omitted studies suggests that they do not differ from those that were included in Figure 1 and Table 1. Additionally, many of the omitted studies that lacked sufficient statistical information would have been excluded in the current study because they were not multivariate analyses, which was critical to assessing how researchers have eliminated rival hypotheses. Finally, it may be more appropriate for conclusions based on the stop initiation and sanction dispositions to be drawn from additional research that explores association and spuriousness results among those outcomes. Neighborhood characteristics, for example, may be of critical importance during the initiation of a stop but inconsequential to post-stop dispositions. This will allow scholars to triangulate their results among a host of findings and better inform our understandings of racial profiling. Conclusion The answer to the causal question of racial profiling remains largely elusive because researchers have failed to make a causal connection between citizen race and officer decision-making. While automobile stop data has been able to establish some consistency in the associative relationship between citizen race and officer decision-making, temporal order and spuriousness issues continue to plague racial profiling research. More specifically, stop initiation research tends to be temporally inconsistent with officer decision-making and post-stop dispositions are rarely specified in automobile stop data. Additionally, specification error has constrained our ability to fully engage in falsification, as researchers rarely estimate departmental, passenger, vehicle, and temporal factors that can influence officer decision-making. Narrowly constructed analytical strategies and a heavy reliance on static secondary data analyses continue to perpetuate these issues. In order to advance this field of inquiry, researchers should engage in primary data collection and work with stakeholders to amend current data collection procedures based on existing knowledge of officer decision-making. Furthermore, researchers should explore recent statistical innovations in their analytical strategies. Addressing these methodological issues will advance our understandings of racial profiling, ground our theoretical understandings of the driving while Black phenomenon in reality, and provide citizens with the procedural justice transparency that they demand. Notes 1  Though 'race' is used throughout this manuscript, this is not to imply that the differential treatment of ethnic minorities is any less important. Rather, these terms are equally relevant to this text. 2  This should not be misconstrued, however, as delegitimizing community perceptions, which are often symptomatic of citizen assessments of procedural fairness (Tyler & Wakslak, 2004). Rather, the point here is to highlight the methodological gap between citizen perceptions and the reality of racial profiling. 3  Paoline and Terrill (2005) and Rydberg and Terrill (2010) were among the 12 studies identified by Bolger (2014). These studies, however, employ the same Project on Policing Neighborhoods data. Accordingly, the weight of these studies in these analyses may be overestimated. It is also worth noting that three-quarters of these studies were from peer review journals, while two were retrieved from technical reports, and the final was observed in a dissertation. 4  Figure 1 does not account for variations in methodological rigor. Nevertheless, racial disparity among all these endeavors was characterized as significant covariation between racial minority status and the search disposition at the p<.05 significance threshold or greater. 5  Three variables were categorized as 'Other' because they did not easily fit into an officer decision-making typology. 6  The lone exception to this statement, Rydberg and Terrill (2010), accounted for the number of officers on the scene of the police-citizen encounter. 7  The operationalization of the driver's race and/or ethnicity has lacked consistency in this field of inquiry. 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Upper Saddle River, NJ : Pearson Prentice Hall. ~~~~~~~~ By Seth Wyatt Fallik Seth Wyatt Fallik is an assistant Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida Atlantic University. He has been involved in local, state, national, and foundation funded research involving original qualitative and quantitative data collection, analysis, and dissemination. Dr Fallik is an action researcher and methodologist that is often drawn to multi-stakeholder projects involving disenfranchised populations, community service providers, and policy-makers. His solo and co-authored translational scholarship appears in the top criminal justice journals and is often consumed by researchers and practitioners alike. Copyright of Criminal Justice Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. Choose Language Amit Pundik* AGAINST RACIAL PROFILING† A police officer sees a suspicious bulge in the pocket of a passing pedestrian and de- liberates whether to stop and search. The pedestrian is also a young, black man, and from past searches and convictions, the police arguably know that such men are much likelier than other people to carry an illegal firearm. Should the police offi- cer be instructed to take this information into account? This article objects to racial profiling because it relies on the following type of inference: from the individual’s membership of a certain racial group, the searcher is invited to infer that the indi- vidual is likelier to exhibit some culpable behaviour. The article shows that such an inference to culpable behaviour requires contradictory presuppositions about the free- dom of the suspected behaviour. On the one hand, racial profiling ought to presup- pose that the individual suspect’s behaviour is unfree because the inference it involves takes the suspect’s behaviour to be determined by his race, age, and gender, none of which is within his control. On the other hand, similarly to criminal trials, search practices ought also to presuppose the exact opposite: that the individual is free to determine his own behaviour. If the suspected behaviour is free, the involved inference to culpable behaviour is not probative of the individual suspect’s beha- viour, so profiling methods which rely on it are useless. And if the suspected beha- viour is unfree, the inference is probative, but the suspect is not culpable and should thus not be put to trial, whatever the profiled search yields. Keywords: freedom, causation, policing, searches, criminal process A police officer sees a suspicious bulge in the pocket of a passing pedes- trian and deliberates whether to stop and search. While the bulge is not necessarily proof of carrying an illegal firearm, it is certainly a legitimate indication. The pedestrian is also a young, black man, and from past searches and convictions, the police arguably know that such men are much likelier than other people to carry an illegal firearm. Should the police officer be instructed to take this information into account? The issue is not limited to policing, as some Muslims who are regularly * Lecturer, Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel † I would like to thank the University of Toronto Law Journal, the anonymous referees, and the editor, David Dyzenhaus, for helping me improve the quality of this article. I am deeply grateful to Ronen Avraham, Yitzhak Benbaji, Antje du Bois-Pedain, François du Bois, Ha- noch Dagan, Benjamin Eidelson, Ariel Porat, Guy Sela, Victor Tadros, and Charlie Webb for their constructive and helpful comments. I also benefited from engaging discussions with participants of workshops at Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews, and Tel Aviv. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Se- venth Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under Grant Agreement 299653. (Spring 2017) UTLJ © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS DOI: 10.3138/UTLJ.3883 selected for an ‘enhanced security check’ at airports could testify.1 Nor is it necessarily limited to searching for weapons and bombs; if, one day, the tax authority notices that Jews are much likelier to cheat on their tax returns, should more Jews be selected for random investigation? Search practices which are based on racial profiling are deeply contro- versial. On the one hand, racial profiling has become immensely popu- lar in some police and security forces both inside and outside the United States,2 and this popularity is not without academic support.3 Racial pro- filing is often advocated as a means of maximizing the effectiveness of scarce resources in controlling crime and preventing terrorist attacks.4 On the other hand, some criticize the reliability of profiling methods, drawing attention to difficulties involved in collecting, analyzing, and presenting the data underlying such search practices.5 Others emphasize that racial profiling is offensive even if statistically reliable,6 adding that profiling methods stigmatize not only the profiled individual but also the 1 Kevin R Johnson, ‘Racial Profiling after September 11: The Department of Justice’s 2003 Guidelines’ (2004) 50:1 Loy L Rev 67 at 78; Jack Glaser, Suspect Race: Causes and Consequences of Racial Profiling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) at 151; Leda Blackwood, ‘Policing Airport Spaces: The Muslim Experience of Scrutiny’ (2015) 9:3 Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice 255 at 255. 2 The cross-border popularity of these measures has led the United Nations to call for the elimination of ‘racial profiling.’ See Measures to Combat Contemporary Forms of Rac- ism and Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, GA Res 56/267, UN Doc A/56/49 (2002) 31 at para 21. 3 See, most notably, Michael Levin, ‘Responses to Race Differences in Crime’ (1992) 23:1 Journal of Social Philosophy 5. See also Risse and Zeckhauser, who argue that, with some qualifications, ‘the utilitarian argument . . . supports police and security measures that make race a consideration in deciding whom to stop, search, or investi- gate’ and that ‘the use of race in police tactics is neither unfair nor does it violate any moral right.’ Mathias Risse & Richard Zeckhauser, ‘Racial Profiling’ (2004) 32:2 Phi- losophy and Public Affairs 131 at 133 [Risse & Zeckhauser, ‘Racial Profiling’]. 4 Nicola Persico, ‘Racial Profiling, Fairness and Effectiveness of Policing’ (2002) 92:5 American Economics Review 1472 at 1472–3. See also the various views described in Samuel R Gross & Debra Livingston, ‘Racial Profiling under Attack’ (2002) 102:5 Colum L Rev 1413. 5 Michael R Smith & Geoffrey P Alpert, ‘Searching for Direction: Courts, Social Science, and the Adjudication of Racial Profiling Claims’ (2002) 19:4 Justice Quarterly 673 at 678 and the sources there; Steven N Durlauf, ‘Racial Profiling as a Public Policy Ques- tion: Efficiency, Equity, and Ambiguity’ (2005) 95:2 American Economics Review 132 at 132–4; Michal Tamir, ‘Public Law as a Whole and Normative Duality: Reclaiming Administrative Insights in Enforcement Review’ (2006) 12:1 Texas Journal on Civil Liberties and Civil Rights 43 at 95. 6 David A Harris, Profiles in Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work, revised ed (New York: New Press, 2003). 176 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LAW JOURNAL (Spring 2017) UTLJ © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS DOI: 10.3138/UTLJ.3883 entire profiled group, most of which is law-abiding.7 Finally, some have argued that such search practices are counter-effective.8 This article seeks to expose an additional problem with racial profiling, arising from its reliance on the following type of inference: from the indivi- dual’s membership of a certain racial group, the searcher is invited to infer that the individual is likelier to exhibit some culpable behaviour (hereinafter referred to as ‘inference to culpable behaviour’). The article seeks to show that inference to culpable behaviour requires contradictory presuppositions. Unlike existing objections, the argument thus focuses on the epistemic qualities of racial profiling rather than on its social costs. Racial profiling is unsuitable for policing because it is irrational for the criminal justice system to deploy profiling in order to detect a person who engages in criminal activity and then put that person to trial.9 Neverthe- less, since this irrationality has substantial costs under any theory of social costs (for example, by affecting the system’s effectiveness, legitimacy, or public perception), the article is also relevant to any cost-benefit analysis of racial profiling. The crux of the argument is that racial profiling requires contradictory presuppositions about the freedom of the suspected behaviour. To iden- tify the contradictory presuppositions, the article builds on a general approach that I developed elsewhere,10 according to which legal fact- finding in criminal trials is connected to the issue of free will. This article 7 William M Carter, Jr, ‘A Thirteenth Amendment Framework for Combating Racial Profiling’ (2004) 39:1 Harv CR-CLL Rev 17 at 24–7; Honorable Phyllis W Beck & Patri- cia A Daly, ‘State Constitutional Analysis of Pretext Stops: Racial Profiling and Public Policy Concerns’ (1999) 72:3 Temp L Rev 597 at 617–18. 8 Harcourt, e.g., explains that the overall crime rate within an entire society might increase as a result of profiling, even when profiling succeeds in reducing the crime rate within the profiled group. Bernard E Harcourt, ‘Rethinking Racial Profiling: A Critique of the Economics, Civil Liberties, and Constitutional Literature, and of Crimi- nal Profiling More Generally’ (2004) 71:4 U Chicago L Rev 1275. Another example is Schauer, who voices efficiency and moral concerns about ‘the overuse of race and eth- nicity and the consequent underuse of other relevant factors.’ Frederick Schauer, Pro- files, Probabilities, and Stereotypes (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003) at 187 [Schauer, Profiles, Probabilities]. 9 Even those who hold that ‘we owe nobody . . . an across-the-board duty to be rational’ are likely to accept that public authorities like the police have a duty to avoid irrational inferences when deciding how to treat suspects. See John Gardner, ‘On the Ground of Her Sex(uality)’ (1998) 18:1 Oxford J Legal Stud 167 at 168. A similar obligation is likely to apply even when the security forces are privatized. See text accompanying note 47 below. 10 Amit Pundik, ‘Freedom and Generalisation,’ online: (2016) Oxford J Legal Stud gqw016 <https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqw016> [Pundik, ‘Freedom and Generalisation’]. For a detailed criticism, see Federico Picinali, ‘Generalisations, Causal Relationships, and Moral Responsibility’ (2016) 20:2 International Journal of Evidence and Proof 121. AGAINST RACIAL PROFILING 177 (Spring 2017) UTLJ © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS DOI: 10.3138/UTLJ.3883 https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqw016 extends the approach by arguing that racial profiling requires contradict- ing presuppositions regarding the freedom of the suspect’s behaviour. On the one hand, racial profiling and the inference to culpable behaviour it involves take the suspect’s behaviour to be determined by his race, age, and gender, none of which is within his control. Racial profiling thus pre- supposes that the suspect’s behaviour is unfree.11 On the other hand, simi- larly to criminal trials, search practices ought to presuppose the exact opposite – namely, that the individual is free to determine his own beha- viour. If the suspected behaviour is in fact free, the involved inference to culpable behaviour is not probative of the individual suspect’s behaviour, rendering profiling methods which rely on it useless. Alternatively, if the suspected behaviour is unfree, the inference is probative, but the suspect is not culpable and should thus not be put to trial as long as criminal trials seek to avoid punishing those who are not culpable. The article is structured in the following way. The second Part ex- plains why inferring from the suspect’s (racial) group that he is likelier to exhibit some behaviour requires a causal generalization, according to which the property shared by the group members determines their be- haviour.12 The third Part identifies the theories of free will under which behaviour which is so determined is not free and shows that inferring culpable behaviour from group membership is contradictory even when the generalization used is probabilistic. The fourth Part shows that search practices that are aimed at bringing offenders to justice require presup- posing that the individual’s suspected behaviour is culpable and thus free. Deploying racial profiling in such practices and then indicting and convicting those who are caught using these methods is therefore contra- dictory. The final Part identifies the types of search to which the argu- ment of this article applies and also explains why common non-profiled types of search are not subject to the same objection. 11 As for profiling based on variables which are within the suspect’s control, see infra text accompanying note 62. 12 The second and third Parts of this article rehearse the argument I made in Pundik, ‘Freedom and Generalisation,’ supra note 10, and apply them to the issue of racial profiling. Given the complexity of the issues involved (causation, free will, and so on), I chose to repeat the argument itself in full and yet to remove some of the more nuanced qualifications. Readers who are not familiar with this article and are left with some concerns about the claims made here might find replies in there, and readers who are already familiar with the argument might want to skip to the text beginning after note 38 below. 178 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LAW JOURNAL (Spring 2017) UTLJ © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS DOI: 10.3138/UTLJ.3883 I Why racial profiling presupposes causation Inferences from a known to an unknown empirical fact involve a gener- alization about types.13 Even eyewitness testimony still requires the use of generalization. In Twelve Angry Men, a 1957 film that depicts a court- room drama, an old lady who testified to seeing the accused from her bedroom window is discredited once it is discovered that at the relevant time she was not wearing her glasses. Discrediting her testimony relies on a generalization that short-sighted people are not very credible eye- witnesses even when they are sure of their identification. From what is known of short-sighted people in general, we can infer that her specific testimony is not to be trusted. Furthermore, drawing inferences on the credibility of any eyewitness inevitably relies on some generalizations of how credible such identifications are under similar conditions.14 For instance, the identification accuracy of the eyewitness is significantly re- duced when the event includes violence because attention is diverted from the visual characteristics of the actors to the violent acts; once again, assessing the testimony of an eyewitness to a violent event requires taking into account a generalization of how the violence affects the eye- witness’s credibility. It therefore seems that the use of any evidence in fact-finding requires the use of some generalization.15 As Peter Tillers summarizes this point, it is impossible to avoid using generalizations in fact-finding because doing so would mean that ‘the only evidence that is legitimate is only the particular matter or act – the “specific” matter or act – that stands in question. It is not helpful to be told that the only valid evi- dence of what happened is what happened.’16 In some cases, the reference to the generalization is made explic- itly. For example, inferring that Socrates is mortal from our knowledge that human beings are mortal refers explicitly to a generalization about human beings as a type. However, in many cases, the generalization is implicit in the inference. Consider, for example, the inference from the fact that a certain person reacted allergically to a certain cat to the fact that this individual is likely to react allergically to that cat in future. This 13 See e.g. Schauer, Profiles, Probabilities, supra note 8 at 101, who holds that ‘the avoid- ance of generalizations is, with few or no qualifications, simply not possible at all.’ 14 For a summary of the troubling findings on the reliability of eyewitnesses, see Paul Ro- berts & Adrian Zuckerman, Criminal Evidence, 2d ed (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) at 297–301. 15 William Twining, ‘Narrative and Generalizations in Argumentation about Questions of Fact’ (1999) 40:2 S Tex L Rev 351 at 356. 16 Peter Tillers, ‘If Wishes Were Horses: Discursive Comments on Attempts to Prevent In- dividuals from Being Unfairly Burdened by Their Reference Classes’ (2005) 4:1–2 Law, Probability and Risk 33 at 44 (emphasis added). AGAINST RACIAL PROFILING 179 (Spring 2017) UTLJ © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS DOI: 10.3138/UTLJ.3883 inference is presumably based on our knowledge of an allergy as a condi- tion which appears persistently rather than erratically. This knowledge implies one or more generalizations which could serve as the basis for that inference (though making this inference does not require identify- ing in advance what the implicit generalization is). For example, the gen- eralization implied by the inference could be that the type of people who reacted allergically to cats (or, alternatively, to a specific cat) is likely to continue to react allergically. The important point is that drawing an inference from one empirical fact to another presupposes that there is at least one generalization about types of fact that somehow connects the fact from which the inference begins and the fact with which the infer- ence ends. Without such a presupposition, the inference is invalid be- cause it remains unclear what licenses the move from the first fact to the second. This section argues that inferences drawn from (racial) group member- ship to culpable behaviour require a causal generalization – namely, a gen- eralization that reflects a causal connection between the type of fact from which the inference begins and the type of fact which the inference seeks to establish. If an inference is based on a non-causal generalization – a mere correlation – it is arguably unlicensed and thus invalid.17 The causal relation can be either direct or through a common cause. Inferring that a smoker is likelier to contract cancer than a non-smoker is based on a causal generalization that smoking is a cause of (lung) cancer. By contrast, inferring that a Coca-Cola drinker is more likely to contract (skin) cancer than a non-drinker involves a causal generalization that reflects a common cause. It is living in a hot country which is the common cause of both Coca-Cola drinking and (skin) cancer. Furthermore, for the inference to be valid, it is not necessary to refer to a specified (direct or indirect) causal generalization. The inference is valid so long as the existence of such a causal generalization is presupposed. That valid inferences must presuppose causal generalizations becomes clear when considering the opposite stance, according to which some in- ferences could be based on mere correlation. Such a stance would still require that the generalization on which a valid inference is based satis- fies certain conditions or standards, such as statistical significance. It would insist, however, that a correlation between two types of fact can be used to infer an unknown from a known fact, even if there is no causal connection between the types of fact, not even indirectly. 17 This claim is part of the Common Cause Principle. See Hans Reichenbach, The Direc- tion of Time, 2d ed (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991) at 157–60; Frank Arntzenius, ‘The Common Cause Principle’ (1992) 2 Proceedings of the Bien- nial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 227. 180 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LAW JOURNAL (Spring 2017) UTLJ © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS DOI: 10.3138/UTLJ.3883 The difficulty with such a stance is that it renders the rejection of spu- rious correlations more difficult. Spurious correlations are those which do not reflect any actual connection (either causal or not) between the two types of fact, such as the seemingly perfect correlation between the divorce rate in Maine and the per capita consumption of margarine in the United States.18 The lack of any actual connection between these facts entails that this spurious correlation does not hold outside the group of initially observed cases. Hence, it would be a mistake to infer anything about the consumption of margarine from the divorce rate (or vice versa) in a year which is not included in the group of years within which the spurious correlation was identified. Drawing any inference from a spurious correlation to an unobserved case is therefore unli- censed and misleading, whatever the purpose of the inquiry is (be it ob- taining knowledge, providing explanation, making prediction about unobserved cases, and so on). Ensuring that a given correlation is not spurious is important because, unfortunately, spurious correlations seem to be everywhere, as the real-life example above illustrates. Moreover, spurious correlations ought to be present. Since each specific case con- sists of numerous details (most of them, of course, are unimportant), one could go through a vast number of facts until one finds a group in which the identified fact correlates with the fact that one seeks to estab- lish. For example, one might find a correlation between certain human behaviour and the second (or third) letter of the surname of the per- son’s grand aunt. If one accepts that inferences require causal generalizations, one could apply methods to distinguish between a causal and non-causal con- nection (whatever these methods are)19 in order to identify which gener- alizations are spurious. However, if one denies this, one ought to find how to distinguish between informative and spurious correlations. Note that mere statistical significance will not do because enumerating suffi- ciently large numbers of variables using sufficiently large databases would eventually generate statistically significant, yet spurious, generali- zations. One might hope that such absurd statistically significant correla- tions simply do not exist. Yet this hope relies on the belief that statistically significant correlations need to ‘make sense’ – that is, that it would be possible to explain why this correlation holds, and what would such an explanation be if not causal or causal-like? 18 Tyler Vigen, Spurious Correlations, online: <http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious- correlations>. 19 Various sophisticated methods have been proposed, such as the Markov condition and Bayesian nets. For a detailed introduction, see Jon Williamson, Bayesian Nets and Causality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). AGAINST RACIAL PROFILING 181 (Spring 2017) UTLJ © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS DOI: 10.3138/UTLJ.3883 http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations One might challenge this argument using counter-examples in which an inference from a known to an unknown fact is made without presup- posing a causal connection between the types of fact. For example, if there are ten balls in a jar, of which nine are blue, it might be possible to infer that the probability of a randomly chosen ball’s being blue is 90 per cent without presupposing any causal connection between ‘being in that jar’ and ‘being blue.’ However, even if not all factual inferences require presupposing a causal connection, the inferences drawn in racial profiling almost always do. Denying an underlying causal connection is easier when the general- ization is extracted from a group of cases to which the instant case at hand belongs. It is important to note that the randomly chosen ball is itself one of the ten balls in the jar. By contrast, generalizations used in racial profiling are almost always extracted from a group of cases which does not include the instant case. For example, the rate of carrying illegal firearms among young black men is inferred from a group of cases in which it was known that the individuals carried illegal firearms. The sus- pect is clearly not a member of this group because the question is whether this particular young black man is carrying an illegal firearm and data on the carrying rate among other young black men are brought to support the conclusion that he is likelier to do so. This difference is important because, if the case at hand is included in the group of known cases on which the generalization is based, it might be possible to draw some inferences about it without presupposing any- thing about the relation between the types of fact. While such inferences raise a set of difficult problems,20 these differ in kind from those in- volved in drawing inferences from generalizations which do not include the case at hand.21 To infer the probability that a randomly chosen ball is blue from the proportion of blue balls in another jar, it is necessary to presuppose that there is some substantial relation between ‘being in a jar’ and ‘being blue.’ Similarly, inferring that it is likelier that a specific young black man is carrying an illegal firearm from past arrest and con- viction rates among the racial group to which he belongs requires pre- supposing that there is some substantial relation between ‘being a young black man’ and ‘carrying an illegal firearm.’ And, again, if this substan- tial relation is not causal or causal-like, what else could it be? 20 See e.g. Alan Hájek, ‘Fifteen Arguments against Hypothetical Frequentism’ (2009) 70:2 Erkenntnis 211. 21 This issue is related, of course, to the problem of induction, both in David Hume’s original version and particularly in Goodman’s newer version. See Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 4th ed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 182 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LAW JOURNAL (Spring 2017) UTLJ © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS DOI: 10.3138/UTLJ.3883 II Why inferring culpable behaviour from group membership is contradictory A THE METAPHYSICS OF FREE WILL One of the main problems regarding free will is the ancient question of whether free will is compatible with determinism: can anyone be free if every given event, including human behaviour, is fully determined by the preceding state of affairs and the laws of nature?22 Understanding the world around us usually involves searching for causes, and this search tends to presuppose that every event is determined by applying causal laws of nature to its antecedent conditions (even if not all of these laws are known, the search for causes presupposes their existence). On the other hand, if human behaviour too is determined by the past, in what sense is it any freer than that of inanimate objects? As Benedict de Spi- noza provocatively suggests, if a falling stone had consciousness, it ‘would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it contin- ued in motion solely because of its own wish.’23 One kind of response seeks to show that, despite the apparent tension, determinism is compatible with freedom. A simple version of compatibi- lism holds that a person is free whenever she would have done otherwise had she chosen to. Consider, for example, a man who dines in a restaurant and deliberates between ice cream and fruit salad for dessert. His order- ing ice cream may be free even if this choice was determined by his genetic composition, upbringing, and so on because he would have ordered the fruit salad had he chosen to. By contrast, a person who trips over something is not free to stop falling because he would not remain standing even had he chosen to. While there are various compatibilist strategies to explain how freedom is compatible with determinism,24 they all share the view that being determined by causal antecedent fac- tors does not, in and of itself, render human behaviour unfree. By contrast, many people believe that if human behaviour is fully determined by causal antecedent factors, then it cannot be free.25 In the previous example, if the diner’s choice of ice cream were determined by his genetics or upbringing, then he was not really free to choose the fruit 22 A detailed introduction can be found in Robert Kane, A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) [Kane, Contemporary Introduction]. 23 Benedict de Spinoza, ‘Letter LXII (LVIII)’ in MW Dunne, ed, Improvement of the Under- standing: Ethics and Correspondence of Benedict de Spinoza, trans RHM Elwes (New York: Dover Publication, 1901) 395 at 396 (letter sent from Benedict de Spinoza to GH Schaller, October 1674). 24 Kane, Contemporary Introduction, supra note 22, ch 2, 7. 25 But see Eddy Nahmias, Jason Shepard, & Shane Reuter, ‘It’s OK If “My Brain Made Me Do It”: People’s Intuitions about Free Will and Neuroscientific Prediction’ (2014) 133 Cognition 502 at 503. AGAINST RACIAL PROFILING 183 (Spring 2017) UTLJ © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS DOI: 10.3138/UTLJ.3883 salad because he is no different from the tripping person. The libertar- ian response embraces this intuition and holds that human behaviour is not always determined by the laws of nature, so determinism must be false.26 Human behaviour can thus be free, and sometimes is, but only when it is not determined by antecedent causal factors; not even by the agent’s genetic composition or upbringing. Furthermore, the agent’s be- haviour must not only be undetermined by antecedent factors, but it must also be under the agent’s …