The brutal killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, caused a storm of protest against racist police brutality in the USA. But racism is not just a problem of the American police — it is a burning issue in Austria as well. Especially “racial profiling” is something members of minority groups have to deal with on a daily basis.
Racial profiling, also called ethnic profiling, is what happens when civil servants use assumed or actual ethnicity, religion, skin color, language, or citizenship as a basis for deciding on when and how to act. Well-known examples of this are targeted police controls of PoC without any concrete suspicion of a criminal offence. In Austria, racial profiling is prohibited.