Racial profiling is the tactic of stopping someone because of the color of his or her skin and fleeting suspicion that the person is engaging in criminal behavior. This practice can be conducted with routine traffic stops, or can be completely random based on the car that is driven, or the number of people in the car and the race of the driver and the passengers. Racial profiling has been a part of the criminal justice system for a long time now, and is nothing new. The only reason why you hear a lot more about this topic is because the use of media has brought this very controversial topic to the public's attention a lot more than in the past. The question that remains unanswered is, is racial profiling good or bad, and does it really have an effect on the way police fight crime effectively
             Racial profiling can be broken down into two meanings, hard profiling and soft profiling. A case of hard profiling would be when a officer sees a black person and without more to go on, pulls him over for a pat-down on the chance that he may be carrying drugs or weapons. Soft profiling would a case like when the state police get a tip off that a certain nationality is trafficking drugs down a certain highway and like to drive a certain type of vehicle, and from this intelligence the trooper pulls over a person matching this stereotype in a hope to find drugs.
             The racial profiling debate focuses primarily on highway stops. The police are pulling over a disproportionate number of minority drivers for traffic offenses in order to look for drugs. The driver may have been speeding, but the reason why he pulled over that car, and not the car next to him, might have to do with the color of his skin. Highway stops should almost always be color blind, unless the officer has clues to go on to make the stop. The DEA taught state troopers come common identifying signs of drugs carriers. Nervousness was the number one trait seen, with o...