So I was talking to bizarro-Zeeshan last night about how he thought racial profiling was a good idea. I, being a sound-minded young liberal, told him that I disagreed with this radical assertion. I did, however, realize that (as bizarro-Zeeshan reminded me) that many liberals absentmindedly dismiss racial profiling as a racist policy with no good qualities. The problem with this approach is that it fails to rationally address the pros and cons of racial profiling. Now, the classic arguement in favor of racial profiling (I'm going to just address racial profiling of black people for now) is that black people are more prone to commit a crime than any other race, so it makes sense to use race as a factor in suspect profiling and determining guilt. The first problem with this arguement is that there are no statistics about how prone black people are to commit crimes. The statistics are about how many black people have been convicted of committing crimes. Many people will claim that these are the same thing, but there are a few subtle differences. First of all, just because you've been convicted of a crime doesn't mean you actually committed said crime. Second of all, just because a higher percentage of black people have committed a crime than any other race, doesn't mean that any given black person is more likely to have committed a crime than any given white person. However, it is true that, given the truthfulness the above assertion, if you pick a completely random black person and a completely random white person, then it is more likely that the black person has committed a crime, but it is virtually impossible to "randomly" pick a person, especially in the context of law enforcement. Now even if you ignore all that, there are still more reasons not to employ racial profiling. If racial profiling is used in any stage of the criminal justice system, it will necesarily increase the incarceration rate of black people with regard to other races. This will skew the statistics even more towards black people as criminals, creating the mentality of the black criminal, not only in the minds of the country at large, but in black males. This, along with the effects of putting thousands of children's fathers behind bars drastically increases the likelihood of these people committing a crime. It will also increase poverty rates among black people, making it more necesary to resort to crime. To deny these points is rejecting the effects of environment on one's actions, and implies that one believes that race is the main reason that black people "commit more crime" than any other race, which I believe to be invalid.

Here's an article that covers black crime much better than I did in the above article. I think it was very interesting: The Truth About Black Crime