The Committee has recognized that it is critically important to understand the structural nature of racial discrimination. The Committee understands that particularly in societies where racial prejudice has been endemic over many eras, it becomes self-perpetuating in the social institutions that determine economic survival and social advancement. Discrimination, then, takes on a life of its own separate from any individual’s personal bias, thereby allowing the realities of racism to sink below the level of conscious thought and intent. CERD has called for robust special measures and affirmative action programs to be instituted particularly in situations of deeply engrained institutional/structural racism in order to short circuit and overcome the self-serving definitions of merit that often operate within such institutions to justify positions of privilege.3 This key understanding about the structural nature of racial inequality must be central to fashioning remedies. It is essential that States have comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation and strong enforcement institutions with procedures that can be initiated by victims and their representatives. Additionally, there needs to be a comprehensive approach that recognizes the importance of tackling legal regimes, policies and practices that have negative disparate impacts on communities disadvantaged by racial discrimination, regardless of proof that those policies were intended to create harm. CERD has also recognized how the criminal justice system in multi-racial societies can be seen as the instrument of the majority community’s power to marginalize minority communities. The nature of police operations then, as the point of first contact between minority communities and the penal system, is the point at which that power is most forcefully realized. For example, CERD has acknowledged how legalizing or legitimating racial profiling authorizes police to engage minority community members with little or no legal justification. Stop and Frisk policies, Broken Windows Policing Practices and aggressive policing of petty offenses can radically increase the number of contacts between minorities and police. As one scholar, Devon Carbado of UCLA Law School has concluded, in racially charged societies, “The frequency of (Ukraine, 2011) the dismissive attitudes and reluctance to accept the racist or discriminatory nature of hate crimes by the law enforcement authorities as well as the repeated incidents of ethnic and racial profiling by the police, resulting in a majority of the reported hate crimes remaining unanswered (art. 4 (a)). 3 The Committee has demonstrated its understanding of structural discrimination in its General Recommendation on Special Measures and numerous Concluding Observations on country reports. 3