Racial Profiling: A Survey of African American Police Officers

Abstract

This article is an effort to provide data on racial profiling that are not as easily dismissed as anecdotal accounts of individual motorists. The authors conducted a survey of African American police officers in the Milwaukee Police Department in Wisconsin regarding their personal experiences of having been racially profiled, defining racial profiling as any situation in which race is used by a police officer or agency to determine the potential criminality of an individual. This study was not an investigation of the Milwaukee Police Department or of racial profiling within the department but rather of the extent to which Black police officers perceive they have been subjected to racial profiling by any police officer or agency. Police officers understand the intricacies, strategies, and techniques of lawenforcement. Therefore, the observations of Black police officers on the reasonableness of situations in which they have been stopped by police have exceptional validity.