The main benefit of racial profiling, based on opinions of others I have gathered, is to save costs. Particularly, not wasting the government’s valued money and time. The government’s resources are not unlimited, and any strategy that can be successfully used to limit the amount of money and time needed, may allow other demands of the government to use the extra resources.

For racial profiling to be beneficial, the government must use this strategy properly. The race of an individual can be used as an identifier, much like gender and predominate characteristics. It would be extremely irresponsible for a police officer to search for a suspect of a recent crime and ignore their identified race when searching for the suspect. This form of profiling is acceptable because the identification of a suspect’s race allows police officers to use less resources than otherwise needed in a larger pool of potential suspects. Often, police officers have very little to go on when attempting to find a criminal. Officers should be encouraged to use racial data when finding suspects of a crime.

Statistically, men are more likely to commit physical forms of crime, while women are more likely to commit more impersonal criminal acts. That is, if police are looking for the person responsible for beating another person to death, more resources should be used to search for male suspects (when contradictory information is not available). This does not mean that a women did not do it, however based on previous findings, it is far more likely the suspect is a male. This should also apply to race. Again, current statistics illustrate that black men are more likely to commit illegal acts than white women. This is not a prejudice idea; it is objective and a relevant mean in finding criminals rationally.

Racial profiling is not used correctly if a police officer believes that all black people have broken the law. This is counterproductive because if race is not apart of the information of a suspected (for example) identity thief, resources would be wasted in Only looking for black men while white women are statistically more likely to commit that form of crime.

Racial profiling allows limited resources to stretch further than without this form of strategy. For a specific example of this idea applied to the real world, you only need to look at southern states located near the Mexican boarder. There has been a lot of debate about racial profiling Mexicans because of the increase in illegal immigrants entering America from Mexico. According to the United States laws, it is illegal to live in this country without citizenship (or certain government documents that allow noncitizens to do so for acceptable reasons). So, if states that are close to the Mexican boarder want to crack down on enforcing the law against illegally living in the United States, then they have every right to focus their resources in finding people that have broken the law.

It would be very ignorant to not apply racial profiling to manage a government branch’s resources, especially when the persons guilty are almost entirely one form of race (there are rare cases of people from different countries entering America through the Mexican boarder). In this case, the color of someone’s skin is used as an identifier that gives law enforcement further information of suspects that are breaking the law. It is not racist for law enforcement to ask an individual for proper government identification, if they physically appear to be of Mexican heritage, in a state close to the Mexican boarder, and when there is no other information that would suggest citizenship (aka fluency in English or their occupation requires the presence of government identification).

Racial profiling, when used without prejudice bias, can financially benefit the government and its varying branches. It is not about stereotyping, it is about applying statistical/objective evidence to a situation when there is a significant lack of information to go off of properly.