There are long-standing allegations of police harassment of Roma and other visible minorities in Europe in the course of ordinary crime prevention, and in new reports of law enforcement targeting Muslims in the fight against terrorism....
moreThere are long-standing allegations of police harassment of Roma and other visible minorities in Europe in the course of ordinary crime prevention, and in new reports of law enforcement targeting Muslims in the fight against terrorism. This article highlights the findings of an international research that seeks to document the existence of ethnic profiling in Hungary, Bulgaria and Spain. According to a standard definition: “Racial or ethnic profiling, as the term has evolved in the United States, encompasses the use by police of racial or ethnic characteristics as one set of clues among others to decide whom to stop, question, search, or otherwise investigate for as-yet unknown criminal offences. In this definition, profiling involves the use of racial or ethnic characteristics to predict which persons among some group might be involved in criminal behavior, even where there is no evidence yet of any particular crime, and no unique suspect.” Based on our respondents’ reports, ethnic profiling — a well-documented phenomenon in the international (mostly English-language) literature — exists in Hungary as well as in the other surveyed countries. Ethnic profiling — a procedure that is discriminatory in its content — is characterized by an important feature: not only is it based on the racist prejudices of the officer conducting stops, but also on seemingly rational presuppositions (each and every one of which has been refuted by empirical studies in the Anglo-American context) that posit a link between ethnicity and the likelihood of criminal behavior. Our study shows that such presuppositions are widespread within the police as well as within the general population (to a large extent, even among the Roma). There is strong societal support for the practice of ethnic profiling in the following respect: even though the majority is fully aware of the fact that stop and search practices are arbitrary, they still would not consider the police presence (with the police enjoying an extraordinarily wide, basically unlimited range of competences) to constitute harassment and are instead in favor of and would even step up the control of “suspicious” individuals and groups (including the Roma and migrants). Part I sets the stage by delineating the general practice of ethnic profiling and ethnicity based selection as well as describing the Hungarian legal framework in regards of the relevant police operations. Part II the moves on to discuss the results of a study conducted under the sponsorship of the Open Society Justice Initiative as part of a comparative research program exploring ethnic differences in experiences of police stops and ID checks in Bulgaria, Hungary and Spain.
