How Racial Profiling Helps

Summary

In the article Racializing Crimmigration by Amada Armenta specifies how police agencies use colorblindness to justify why officers are polling over people especially if they look Latino. The article states how the priority of American policing has been shifted from keeping the community safe have internal safety to the deportation of immigrants and people of minority group. Amada Armenta takes a point of argument that Latinos are being racialized by the everyday duties of an officer.

Many Latinos are getting stopped and searched which then would lead to arrests. Latinos lead to being arrested because many of them don’t have the right identification or not enough legal identification. A big problem for Latinos and Latinas getting arrested and taken to booking is because of racial profiling which is something that is natural to profile someone because of their characteristics, but these people are getting harmed. For example, when officer William pulled over a car and there was a Latino man in the driver seat, he immediately jumped to the conclusion that he was born in Mexico once the officer asked him where he was born the man said Orange County in California (Armenta, 2016).

The officer wants Latinos to be able to present valid identification, but yet there so many hoops that they have to go through to be able to gain an identification. Many of the officers wanted to get there stats up with the police agency which led to more traffic stops for very little fractions. The argument is Amada Armenta is making that the way police agencies viewing to do their jobs is more by having deportations rather than stopping actual crime.

Course Concepts

This article covered systemic and racialized racism as the two theories that were more present in this article. Systemic racism is present in this article because officers’ profile the people that they stop and automatically think that this person is a criminal when they are just working and trying to provide for their family. For example, in the case of Adela an officer followed her until he decided to pull her because she had not used her turn signal to switch lanes, but immediately multiple officers showed up these officers went through her car and purse in hopes of finding something illegal (Armenta, 2016).

If she was stopped on a turn signal violation it was unnecessary search her car and have her get out of the car. The officer probably pulled her over because she was Latina, he profiled with what he his job requires that these people are the once that create the most amount of crimes. Here we see how unequal minority groups are treated because if that was a white man or female that was stopped than they would have not searched the car and made a big scene about the whole thing.

Racialized was also presented in this article because the laws or rules that are created are to benefit whites. For example, the way that it was set up to receive a license in Tennessee all state residents were eligible to receive a driver license and identification cards (Armenta, 2016). Then this was changed that you had to provide a social security number which left many noncitizens out of being able to get a driver license or ID (Armenta, 2016). These laws were made to benefits whites because there were the ones that would be able to present this kind of information. Which then would lead to Latinos being arrested because they couldn’t provide information to say who they are especially because it was up to the police officer if he would accept foreign identifications (Armenta, 2016). Then Latinos that had to go in the police station and it would come back saying that they are undocumented then they would be in the process for deportation.

Discussion

I personally enjoyed reading this article because I am taking a class in policing and communities and the information kind of overlapped with each other. The information that was taken is very applicable to what we are seeing today in society. Many people that are undocumented are afraid to get stopped for a minor infraction and end up getting deported. Society is still very Racialized rules that we have still favor the whites even though we say that everyone has an equal opportunity to everything even though we know that they don’t.

Reading this article definitely made me realize that police agencies need to do a better job in not classifying a person because this way more people are getting hurt. But also learning what type of people are in each community is also very beneficial for officers because if a white officer gets sent to an African American community people will feel like they cannot trust the officer to come up them to tell them their problems. Reading this makes sense that police agencies need to diversify their officer a little better because than the people that are getting stopped are going to more variety than just one person. But also, all communities will be better covered by having different races that can attend to the problem and help the minority group. 

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