Noah Berlatsky on Racial Profiling in Prostitution Arrests

Typically
the term “profiling” is used in discussions of the way police
target young men of color for things like drug crimes or weapon
possession. But police profiling isn’t only focused on men. Noah
Berlatsky explores a new report on prostitution arrests in New
York and finds strong evidence that black women are frequently
profiled as prostitutes by New York police. In Brooklyn, for
instance—where blacks make up about one-third of the total
population—black women faced a whopping 94 percent of charges on
the nebulous offense of “loitering for the purposes of
prostitution”.

View this article.