Racial Profiling

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As racial profiling (also called "ethnic profiling") refers to a frequently stereotypes based and external characteristics act of police -, security, immigration and customs officials, according to which a person based on criteria such as " race ", ethnicity , religion or national origin is assessed as suspicious and not based on concrete suspicions against the person. The term comes from the US American criminalistics .

Racial profiling has been criticized as discriminatory and ineffective and is banned in the United Kingdom and the US , for example , but is used in Israel to counter terrorism . There is no explicit legal regulation in Germany. Racial profiling is assigned to institutional racism by critics .

Manifestations

Profiles of suspects published by law enforcement agencies with naming ethnic characteristics or skin color as well as the activity of the case analyst (English profiler ) are not referred to as racial profiling .

Racial profiling occurs:

  • in the fight against illegal immigration through identity checks at train stations, airports, trains and in the border area of ​​people who outwardly have a “foreign appearance”;
  • in the fight against Islamist terrorism through identity checks of mosque visitors or “Muslim-looking” persons and in the correspondingly motivated computer search ;
  • in cases where law enforcement agencies take action against ethnically defined "common suspects", such as B. in the USA with increased controls of black vehicle owners ( Driving While Black ).

Legal position

According to the European Network Against Racism, racial profiling violates the constitutional principle of equality and is a form of discrimination prohibited by international law. Racial profiling is banned in many countries . For example, it is banned in the UK and the US.

In Germany, racial profiling by the federal police violates Article 3 (3) of the Basic Law , following a ruling by the Koblenz Higher Administrative Court in 2016 . The public interest in preventing unauthorized entry in accordance with Section 22 (1a) BPolG is not so serious that it can exceptionally justify unequal treatment because of skin color.

criticism

Racial profiling is criticized as inefficient and ineffective. According to the European Network Against Racism (ENAR) , it is counterproductive in the fight against crime and terrorism because it marginalizes the very communities on whose cooperation the authorities depend. It could lead to the fact that certain groups of perpetrators do not even come into the field of view of the law enforcement authorities - as the failure of the investigative authorities in the case of the series of murders of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) shows. Here the police had long suspected organized crime in the narcotics sector with contacts in Turkey, the acts of the Ceska murder series were referred to in the media as "kebab murders". Relatives of the victims accused the German authorities of unilateral investigations, they had looked in the wrong direction, since possible racist motives had not been taken into account.

Racial Profiling is accused of increasing everyday racism in interaction. On the one hand, inspections often reveal violations (illegal residence, residence obligation, work ban ...) that Germans and EU citizens cannot commit at all. The number of police cases would then often be published unspecifically under the heading “Foreign Crime”. During the police controls in public spaces, outsiders would get the impression that the restriction of controls to people who look different is definitely not without reason.

The police practice of blanket suspicions on the basis of unchangeable characteristics is rated by the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency as a “serious violation of human rights”, and therefore independent, civil advice centers are required by the police.

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Christian Böhme, Johannes C. Bockenheimer: What lessons Israel drew from terror . In: Der Tagesspiegel Online . July 27, 2016, ISSN  1865-2263 ( online [accessed October 6, 2018]).
  2. ↑ a b c Fact Sheet 40: Ethnic Profiling, (German translation) (PDF file; 436 kB), from ENAR , pages 2 and 3, accessed on August 14, 2012
  3. ↑ Dark skin as a characteristic of drug dealers from the anti-racism phone in Essen, accessed on August 14, 2012
  4. ↑ OVG Rhineland-Palatinate on control on the train: Control of a dark-skinned family was illegal. In: Legal Tribune Online . Retrieved August 1, 2018 .
  5. ↑ "Other methods bring more" , interview with the police sociologist Daniela Hunold on the control of North Africans at the turn of the year 2017 in Cologne, tageszeitung Berlin (taz.de) from January 12, 2017.
  6. ↑ Anke Schwarzer: Racial Profiling: Controls Beyond the Right in “Leaves for German and International Politics” No. 1/2014, pp. 17-21.
  7. ↑ victim's widow: "Even I had the police suspected" , Tagesspiegel, November 15, 2011th
  8. ↑ United Nations criticize "Racial Profiling" , press release of the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency of June 16, 2014.