Racial profiling as collective definition

Economists and other interested academics have committed significant time and effort to developing a set of circum-stances under which an intelligent and circumspect form of racial profiling can serve as an effective tool in crime find-ing–the specific objective of finding criminal activity afoot. In turn, anti-profiling advocates tend to focus on the imme-diate efficacy of the practice, the morality of the practice, and/or the legality of the practice. However, the tenor of this opposition invites racial profiling proponents to develop more surgical profiling techniques to employ in crime find-ing. In the article, I review the literature on group distinction to discern its relevance to the practice and study of racial profiling. I argue that the costs of racial profiling extend beyond inefficient policing and the humiliation of law-abiding minority pedestrians and drivers. Racial profiling is simultaneously a process of perception and articulation of relative human characteristics (both positive and negative); it binds and reifies the concepts of race and criminality, fixing them into the subconscious of the profiled, the profiler, and society at large.