Abstract
This Article focuses on the social impacts of police behavior in trying to remove guns (and drugs) off the street through street level searches. Acknowledging that such searches are the only way to find contraband possessors, the Article looks at how well police identify people to search. Discussing the little data currently available, we discover that the police are unnecessarily inefficient because of unjustified reliance on a suspect profile of "black." The available data support our rejection of profiling defenders' claims that, while racial profiling is bad, police are doing something else—empirically, not racially, grounded profiling. The Article then offers a way to quantify the social cost of racial profiling and recommends ways that police management, judges, prosecutors and civilians can create incentives to minimize that harm.
How to Cite
43 Ariz. L. Rev. 413 (2001)
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