I gotta hand it to whoever came up with the term racial profiling as a fancy way to say picking on a specific group. But, to get to the question itself. No' I'm not OK with law enforcement having to constantly defend themselves retroactively when they arrest someone who breaks the law. As far as I am concerned, the people or organizations who are always screaming about the cops engaging in racial profiling are themselves in effect engaging in profiling, i.e., Cops are doing bad things because they are cops. It does bother me when the police overreact to some situations, but to deny that certain groups, on a percentage basis, are more apt to commit certain types of crimes than other groups, is not realistic. It seems to me that almost everyone would accept (largely based on stereotype, but almost undoubtedly backed up by facts, figures, percentages, etc.) that back in the 1920s most big-time gangsters were ethnic Italians (sure, there were a few Irish and Jeswish mobsters too, but the big guns were almost exclusively Italian). So, was it racial (or ethnic) profiling to go after Italians in those days? Wouldn't it have been more than a bit stupid not to have homed in on Italians? Or should the cops have shaken down Poles and Hungarians just to make things look good? Get real, people.
