A powerful, myth-busting argument against racial profiling. Racial profiling--as practiced by police officers,
highway troopers, and customs officials--has become one of America's most explosive public issues. But even as
protest against the practice has swelled, little attention has been given to the law enforcement basis of profiling.
Indeed, profiling has become one of the nation's most hotly contested social issues partly because of the assumption
that underlying the practice is a common-sense consideration of racial patterns in crime. Profiling, it has been
repeatedly argued, is ultimately rational. Profiles in Injustice dismantles those arguments, drawing on a wealth
of new evidence to show convincingly that profiling is not only morally and legally wrong--but startlingly mistaken
and ineffective. In this myth-busting book, David Harris--described by the Seattle Times as "America's leading
authority on racial profiling"--reveals that the data collected by law-enforcement agencies themselves on
racial profiling makes the case against it. Though it has been argued that people of color are targeted by police
because they are disproportionately involved in crime, statistics from several states as well as the Customs Service
show that the "hit rate"--the rates at which police actually find contraband on people they stop--is
actually lower for blacks than for whites, and the hit rate for Latinos is much lower than for either blacks or
whites. Profiles in Injustice is the first book to rigorously scrutinize the rationale and practice of racial profiling,
as well as its remarkably far-reaching effects, from the way profiling hasreinforced residential segregation to
how it has corroded public confidence in the criminal justice system. Harris concludes with an examination of law
enforcement agencies that have pioneered better, more effective policing while renouncing the poison of racial
and ethnic bias.