How did the practice of racial profiling become so pervasive?
Racial profiling is caused by racism, a problem that has endured in our country for some time. The practice of systematic racial profiling became further institutionalized through a 1986 Drug Enforcement Agency program called “Operation Pipeline.” To date, this little known highway drug interdiction program has trained approximately 27,000 police officers in 48 participating states to use pretext stops in order to search for drugs in vehicles. The use of racial profiles was bolstered in the 1990s by a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions allowing police to use traffic stops as a pretext to “fish” for evidence of wrongdoing.
