Racial Profiling in The United States
The United States is not a healthy democracy The United States is not a healthy democracy. A basic requirement for any healthy democracy is its founding on the basic principle that all men are created equal. This means that man is judged on the fact that he is man, and only that. There are no other means or factors brought into account. This is not the way men are judged in the United States. In the United States, ethnic and racial generalizations often influence judicial execution. The attorney general's office of New Jersey itself released a 112 page preliminary report concluding that many officers may be inadvertently discriminating against minorities in their fervor to stop drug traffickers. This report was based on the findings of an investigation on the tactics of New Jersey highway patrols and what criteria they use in identifying suspicious motorists. Among their findings were that over a four year period, eight out of every ten cars pulled over on a southern stretch of the new jersey turnpike were minorities and forty percent of all traffic stops over a twenty month period involved minorities. In addition, the police themselves admit that race is a factor in how they decide whom to stop and search. But the problem is not limited to police officers and their behavior; it escalates into a federal judicial issue in which the profiling is deemed constitutional. In the case u.s. v. Weaver, the u.s. court of appeals for the Eighth Circuit upheld the constitutionality of the officer's actions in using race as a factor (among others) in his decision to stop a potential drug-smuggler. Other courts have agreed with the Eighth Circuit that the constitution does not prohibit using race as a factor when they decide who is a suspect, if this is done for purposes of law enforcement and crime prevention. Furthermore, there is no visible end to this injustice in the near future since state police leadership has encouraged this racial profiling by giving "trooper of the year" awards to those who make big drug arrests and then failing to monitor whether troopers are disproportionately arresting minorities. To the credit of the police, it must be said that their actions, however questionable, were done with only
People of color are being pursued on the highways in the land of the free. In Bob Herbert’s “Hounding the innocent” acts of racial profiling are displayed flagrantly. Racial profiling should be illegal, since it is unfair to its victims, demoralizing, and it breaks the trust between the public and the police.
Jim Crow policing is not a problem, the way certain cops are using it is becoming a problem in certain cities. A Witness of Jim Crow Policing and Racial Profiling, Bob Herbert, believes that the New York police department needs to be restrained due to his personal experiences. The author uses many examples to strengthen his argument in order to influence others to be against Jim Crow policing, yet throughout his article he lets his emotion show too much losing his credibility and straying from logic versus his opinion.
The judicial system in America has always endured much skepticism as to whether or not there is racial profiling amongst arrests. The stop and frisk policy of the NYPD has caused much controversy and publicity since being applied because of the clear racial disparity in stops. Now the question remains; Are cops being racially biased when choosing whom to stop or are they just targeting “high crime” neighborhoods, thus choosing minorities by default? This paper will examine the history behind stop and frisk policies. Along with referenced facts about the Stop and Frisk Policy, this paper will include and discuss methods and findings of my own personal field research.
Racial profiling is the tactic of stopping someone because of the color of his or her skin and a fleeting suspicion that the person is engaging in criminal behavior (Meeks, p. 4-5). This practice can be conducted with routine traffic stops, or can be completely random based on the car that is driven, the number of people in the car and the race of the driver and passengers. The practice of racial profiling may seem more prevalent in today’s society, but in reality has been a part of American culture since the days of slavery. According to Tracey Maclin, a professor at the Boston University School of Law, racial profiling is an old concept. The historical roots “can be traced to a time in early American society when court officials permitted constables and ordinary citizens the right to ‘take up’ all black persons seen ‘gadding abroad’ without their master’s permission” (Meeks, p. 5). Although slavery is long since gone, the frequency in which racial profiling takes place remains the same. However, because of our advanced electronic media, this issue has been brought to the American public’s attention.
One of the biggest reason stop-and-frisk should be abolished is in hopes to decrease such blatant racial profiling that has been going on under the name of “stop-and-frisk”. In 2007, 55% of the people stopped in New York were blacks and 30% were Hispanic (“Update: Crime and Race”). When checked again in 2011 a total of 685,000 people were stopped by the police of that 685,000, 52.9% were African Americans, 33.7% were Latino, and 9.3% were white (“Racial Profiling”). There is a story of an innocent victim of the stop-and-frisk policy, a man by the name of Robert Taylor. Police in Torrance stopped the elderly man and claimed he fit the description of a suspect that was linked to a robbery. But there was one simple problem; Taylor is a light complexioned, tall, 60 year-old man and the suspect was believed to be a short, dark complexioned, stocky man in his thirties; nothing like Taylor at all (Hutchinson). His shows that the police do not always stop people based on the right reasons, they tend to stop people based on the color of thei...
For the past few years there has been an ongoing debate surrounding the issue of racial profiling. The act of racial profiling may rest on the assumption that African Americans and Hispanics are more likely to commit crimes than any individual of other races or ethnicities. Both David Cole in the article "The Color of Justice" and William in the article "Road Rage" take stance on this issue and argue against it in order to make humanity aware of how erroneous it is to judge people without evidence. Although Cole and William were very successful in matters of showing situations and qualitative information about racial profiling in their articles, both of them fail at some points.
"The Supreme Court and Racial Profiling." National Motorists Association, n. d. Web. 4 Mar. 2014. .
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Racial Profiling can happen to anyone, anywhere such as the streets, in the airports, or even just walking home. Racial profiling and the media influence an individual’s perspective on a trial. Racial Profiling is using someone’s race or ethnic background as suspicion for committing a crime. Evidence from past trials dating back to 1920s Sacco and Vanzetti trial to George Zimmerman’s trial in 2013 prove that racial profiling has existed for nearly a century. According to the article “The Quiet Racism in the Zimmerman Trial” by Steven Mazie, he states
Every day you see and hear about minorities groups complain about cops and their tactics against them stopping them while in traffic taking them in to custody or even getting kill over nothing. Racial Profiling is a common thing in this community and it is causing a lot of trouble. According to Minnesota House of Representatives analyst Jim Cleary, "there appear to be at least two clearly distinguishable definitions of the term 'racial profiling ': a narrow definition and a broad definition... Under the narrow definition, racial profiling occurs when a police officer stops, questions, arrests, and/or searches someone solely on the basis of the person 's race or ethnicity... Some ways to stop it is find out who is guilty of it, look at their
Racial Profiling is a big issue amongst people of color and the police force. In this paper I speak about the relations both have between each other and how stereotyping has affected society as a whole.
Racial profiling has been a common controversy between law enforcement and communities, specifically those of a minority population. This activity has been ultimately allowed by federal and state governments as they benefit from the aid in pinpointing or otherwise targeting criminals or illegal aliens. Furthermore, racial profiling has become more of a commonly encountered practice especially after the September 11 attacks.
The justice system is in place in America to protect its citizens, however in the case of blacks and some other minorities there are some practices that promote unfairness or wrongful doing towards these groups. Racial profiling is amongst these practices. In cases such as drug trafficking and other criminal acts, minorities have been picked out as the main culprits based off of skin color. In the article “Counterpoint: The Case Against Profiling” it recognizes racial profiling as a problem in America and states, “[In order to maintain national security] law-enforcement officers have detained members of minority groups in vehicles more than whites”…. “these officers assume that minorities commit more drug offenses, which is not the case” (Fauchon). In relationship to law enforcement there has also been many cases of police brutality leaving young blacks brutally injured, and even dead in recent years, cases such as Michael Brown, Dontre Hamilton, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Freddy Gray just to name a few. Many of these young men were unarmed, and the police involved had no good justification for such excess force. They were seen as threats primarily because of their skin color. Despite the fact this nation is trying to attain security, inversely they are weakening bonds between many of its
Despite the fact racism has been around for hundreds of years, upcoming generations are becoming more open minded and less likely to publicly berate minorities; racial profiling, however, is the one loophole of racism America overlooks. Police officials often use the practices of racial profiling to discretely single out minority races. A common approach to this is through traffic patrols. According to a statistic based in San Jose, CA, nearly 100,000 drivers were stopped; during the year ending in June 2000; and of these drivers less than 32% were white, the remaining 68% of drivers were a... ... middle of paper ... ...
Introduce:.. I think we all can agree that the police agencies image has been destroyed in every way you could possibly think of. I truly believe that no one abides by the police agencies anymore. As technology has enhanced over the years, far beyond cell phones, people are able to see what police officers are really doing while on the force. There have been many video releases when police brutality was revealed, as well as how the police agencies responded to the incident.