Criminal Justice Diversity in Criminal

Criminal Justice Diversity in Criminal Justice No one has ever said that that being a cop on the street is unproblematic. One day they have to be a social worker and the next they have to prepare for a riot. They have to be charming and in control as they ask an intoxicated person to quit urinating in public. The compensation is horrible and they take the risk of getting killed every day.

And then they have to cope with the phenomenon of profiling, either racial in doing their jobs or in another way by just being a cop. In a survey done by the Washington Post, fifty two percent of African-American males reported that they had familiarity with racial profiling first hand. But what occurs when police officers think that they too are sufferers, when they become swayed that they cannot do their work without being known as racists or being wrongly charged with using unacceptable vigor.

What happens is what took place in Cincinnati, OH in April of 2001. In the anxious time since the three days of aggressive altercations in April between generally black demonstrators and generally white cops, many police officers have seemed to have taken a break. According to numbers provided by the city of Cincinnati, in June of 2001 the police made 2,517 arrests for nonviolent crimes like disorderly conduct and weapons infringements; in June of 2000 they made 5,063 of this type of arrest.

Arrests for violent crimes, like murder and arson, went down a little, to 487 from 502, in spite of a 20% increase from the preceding June in the occurrence of those crimes. The numbers for May, the month following the rioting, are very similar. Police officers are extremely discouraged at this increase in crimes but they fear being tagged as a racial profiler every time they go to arrest someone.

What precisely is racial profiling? It does not reduce the seriousness of racial profiling by admitting that that there is no acknowledged definition of what it means. It is not contained in any criminology books. It appears to have become popular in the early 1990's by advocates and not police officers. Prior to those in charge telling the police what they are doing incorrect, they must outline it for themselves first. Criminologists are still trying to figure out how much profiling really goes on.

It is very hard to measure since there is no set definition been determined. It has been suggested that the police are more probable to look for minorities because they commit an uneven amount of crimes. According to statistics in 2001, blacks were twelve percent of the nation's population but accounted for twenty seven percent of all sexual-assault convictions, sixty six percent of all robbery convictions and thirty eight percent of all fraud and embezzlement convictions. If one sets aside the numbers and goes back to Cincinnati.

In 2001, riots exploded following a white officer shooting and killing a black man that was unarmed, who was wanted by the system not for a vicious crime but for a number of misdemeanors, many of which were traffic violations. There was a feeling that this person had been racially profiled to death. Since Cincinnati, like a lot of other cities, doesn't accumulate racial statistics.