Racial Profiling as a Public Policy Question: Efficiency, Equity, and Ambiguity

摘要

Racial profiling continues to be a contentious issue in American society. While official policing policies have in many places banned profiling, the impact of such regulations is unknown. This paper is designed to consider some of the general issues that need to be addressed in evaluating racial profiling as a public policy question. While there is a growing body of theoretical and empirical work on profiling (John Knowles et al., 2001; Nicola Persico, 2002; Jeffrey Dominitz, 2003), with the exceptions of Bernard Harcourt (2004) and Mathias Risse and Richard Zeckhauser (2004), relatively little attention has been paid to integrating efficiency and equity considerations in an overall assessment. The issues discussed here are analyzed in greater detail in Durlauf (2005).