Racial Profiling Versus Community 191 © Society for Applied Philosophy, 2006 © Society for Applied Philosophy, 2006, Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2006 Racial Profiling Versus Community KASPER LIPPERT-RASMUSSEN  A police technique known as racial profiling draws on statistical beliefs about crime rates in racial groups. Supposing that such beliefs are true, and that racial profiling is effective in fighting crime, is such profiling morally justified? Recently, Risse and Zeckhauser have explored the racial profiling of African-Americans and argued that justification is forth- coming from a utilitarian as well as deontological point of view. Drawing on criticisms made by G. A. Cohen of the incentives argument for inequality, I argue that, assuming that crime rates between different racial groups would converge in the absence of racial discrimination and unjust inequality, racial profiling is comprehensively unjustified. I also explain that, because Risse and Zeckhauser simply compare the status quo with an outcome that differs from it only in respect of the practice of racial profiling, they fail to show that such profiling is non-comprehensively justified. And, exploring the problem from the point of view of a deontological concern for fairness, I identify a number of situations in which it would be non-comprehensively unjustified to implement racial profiling (as well as some in which it might be non-comprehensively unjustified not to implement racial profiling). The police sometimes employ group identity profiling and make decisions about the use of scarce resources guided by statistical information about crime rates in different groups of people. Racial profiling is a specific type of group identity profiling. It can be said to occur where, say, there is a greater likelihood that police officers stop, search and question people of a certain race because members of this group are believed to be more likely to possess illegal drugs, but it does not occur where the police are more likely to stop, search and question people of a certain race when investigating a drugs- related crime because witnesses have described the perpetrator as member of that race. In the latter case, the investigative activities are not based on the relevant sort of race- sensitive statistical belief. Similarly, it might be known that people who have a certain job are more likely to commit a certain type of crime, and that almost all of those who happen to have this job belong to a certain racial group. Accordingly, members of different races might be treated differently in preventive police work. But this need not amount to racial profiling (although it might involve occupational profiling). In gen- eral, differential treatment of the members of different racial groups may or may not involve racial profiling, depending on the basis of the treatment. Racial profiling can be, and very often is, morally problematic for various incidental reasons: for its association with racial hostility, double standards, prejudice influencing the formation of statistical beliefs about crime rates in racial groups, biased concep- tions of what constitutes crime, and so on. But suppose we focus on what we might call an unalloyed case of racial profiling. By this I mean a case of the following kind. First, the police activities are based in the right way on justified, true beliefs about