Citation

Pundik A. Univ. Toronto Law J. 2017; 67(2): 175-205.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, University of Toronto Press)

DOI

10.3138/UTLJ.3883

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

A police officer sees a suspicious bulge in the pocket of a passing pedestrian and deliberates whether to stop and search. The pedestrian is also a young, black man, and from past searches and convictions, the police arguably know that such men are much likelier than other people to carry an illegal firearm. Should the police officer be instructed to take this information into account? This article objects to racial profiling because it relies on the following type of inference: from the individual's membership of a certain racial group, the searcher is invited to infer that the individual is likelier to exhibit some culpable behaviour. The article shows that such an inference to culpable behaviour requires contradictory presuppositions about the freedom of the suspected behaviour. On the one hand, racial profiling ought to presuppose that the individual suspect's behaviour is unfree because the inference it involves takes the suspect's behaviour to be determined by his race, age, and gender, none of whic...

Language: en