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".