On Wed, 05 May 2010 13:41:01 -0400, Jim Henderson wrote:

> See the post I just wrote with the OED definition of racial profiling.
> That's the definition I'm using.

In digging through definitions for profiling (which led me to 'offender 
profiling'), I think I see where there may be a disconnect here.

Racial profiling is what I previously defined it as (so I won't re-cite).

Offender profiling, however, is a compound usage that's common in 
Britain, defined as:

offender profiling n. orig. and chiefly Brit. a system of analysing and 
recording the probable psychological and behavioural characteristics of 
the unknown perpetrators of specific crimes so they can be matched with 
the known habits and personalities of suspects

This is something that is done in the US - the idea is basing the 
criteria for a search based on common traits of offenders.  This is not 
the same as racial profiling, because offender profiling uses the 
statistical characteristics of a known class of criminal and starts from 
the traits of those who are known to be guilty of committing a class of 
crime.  It also focuses on psychology and behaviour rather than physical 
traits.

Racial profiling starts at the other end of the spectrum - rather than 
starting with a classification of the guilty, it starts with the 
assumption that someone of a particular race must be guilty.

I can see how the two could be easy to confuse, though, especially when 
popular culture presentations of offender profiling includes sentences 
like "the suspect is probably a black male in his mid-30's [...]" which 
isn't a behavioural or phychological trait that would be used for this 
type of profiling.

Jim

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