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The term connotes good intentions on the part of people doing the profiling. They might be misguided, they might be poorly trained or working in badly designed systems, they might make mistakes, but at heart they’re trying to keep people and property safe.

The trouble is that that definition, even though it includes a lot of badness, is generous to some racists.

Accusing someone of racism tends to be a conversation-stopper, and in the absence of written evidence or a Klan hat, it’s hard to prove. So we dance around it, contorting ourselves to avoid accusing anyone of deliberate impropriety.

“Many people were concerned that the definition does not capture racial profiling that intentionally targets people based on race, using safety as a pretense,” the report says. When we talk about inadvertent stereotyping when what we actually have is straight-up racism, we’re confusing the issue.

It’s no surprise that a survey intended to uncover stories about racial profiling found a lot of them, from a woman who used her swipe card to get into her own office and was immediately visited by security (she wears a hijab) to a group of black men reported for trying to steal a bicycle (one of them owned it and his lock was stuck).

“I find that in some stores I am followed, watched in mirrors. When a Caucasian person walks in, they are greeted with ‘hello.’ I do not get the same treatment,” said a woman identified in the report as middle-aged and black. “It made me aware that there is a perception of my race and what I should or should not be able to afford, in some people’s eyes.”