New Yorker: No Such Thing as Racial Profiling by Jelani Cobb:

The stilted conversations that have followed these tragedies have largely focussed on the meaning and implications of the nonsensical phrase ‘racial profiling.’ Nothing better illustrates the slick, manipulative power of euphemism than the fact that our dialogue takes seriously this non-term. There is no such thing as “racial profiling”-there is simply racism.

HuffPo: Tommy Wall Loses Job, House, Reputation After Police Wrongly Charge Him With Child Rape by David Lohr.

They arrested based on his alleged resemblance to a man in a video, but didn’t look at the video until playing it in court at a hearing 105 days after Wall’s arrest, finally realizing that Wall couldn’t be the guy. At least they admitted it in court.

Wall sat behind bars for 105 days — fearing he’d be stabbed or worse the whole time — before the prosecution played the supposed evidence in court. That was the moment, Wall said, that the sheriff’s office and prosecutors realized they had made a big mistake.

“When they did show it, they noticed I was not the man in the video,” Wall said. “I have tattoos on my back, the guy in the video did not. The voice was different, the hair was different, the glasses were different, the man had a big mole on his head — everything was different.”

Webb said the first time he was permitted to view the video was in court. He said he was shocked that authorities had not bothered to closely examine it prior to Wall’s arrest.