Racial Profiling: Driving While Black is a Real Offense in America

1325 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Racial Discrimination in the Criminal Justice System

“In recent years, scores of African Americans and Latinos, including prominent athletes, members of Congress, actors, lawyers, business leaders and even police officers, have experienced the humiliation of being stopped on the nation’s highways upon suspicion of a crime. Few white motorists can tell the same story.” (Bouie 2014). Most colored motorists have had this feeling at least once while driving. The article, "It's Been Proven: "Driving While Black" is a Real Thing" takes a look at incidents around the United States where the multitude of racial stops have been questioned. They explore three sides of the “driving while black” issue: whites who feel they have never experienced this or were let off for not being colored, blacks who feel they have been discriminated against, and cops defending the force and believing this does not happen.

Many State Troopers were being investigated for a variety of discriminatory stops. An attorney, William Merton, has been a part of the investigation of the troopers and found some very interesting information. A man named John Mean was pulled over by the troopers, where he was driving the same speed as the cars around him and he was pulled over. He then was threatened, with the probability of a search warrant, to give up his privacy rights and be searched. His car was then searched and he was release with a warning, twenty-five minutes later. This incident, like many others, was not reported, which shows a suspicion in the data collected from the department (Bouie 2014).

Through a debate with Christopher A. Darden, an Associate Professor of Law at Southwestern School of Law in Los Angeles and Byron Warnken, a Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law, they ex...

... middle of paper ...

...tute. Web. 28 May 2015.

http://www.policemisconduct.net/

Bouie, Jamelle. "It's Been Proven: "Driving While Black" is a Real Thing" The Daily Beast. Jan. 10 2014. Web. 1 June 2015.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/10/watch-out-driving-while-black-is-still-a-problem.html

Martin, Rich. (2010). "Police Corruption" FBI Web. 23 May 2015.

http://leb.fbi.gov/2011/may/police-corruption-an-analytical-look-into-police-ethics

Harris, David A. ACLU. (1999). "DRIVING WHILE BLACK: RACIAL PROFILING ON OUR NATION'S HIGHWAYS" American Civil Liberties Union. Web. 18 May 2015.

https://www.aclu.org/report/driving-while-black-racial-profiling-our-nations-highways

Harris, D. (n.d.). Cost of Getting Stopped. THE STORIES, THE STATISTICS, AND THE LAW: WHY "DRIVING WHILE BLACK" MATTERS. Web. 30 May 2015.

http://academic.udayton.edu/race/03justice/dwb02.htm

Show More
Related

  • Racial Profiling In Bob Herbert's Hounding The Innocent

    378 Words  | 1 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • United States v. Alvarez

    1055 Words  | 3 Pages

    Washington Law Review, Vol. 86, Issue 4 (December 2011), pp. 841-874 Barnum, Jeffrey C. 86 Wash. L. Rev. 841 (2011)

    Read More

  • Public Enemy Addresses Problems of the Black Community

    2578 Words  | 6 Pages

    Dyson, Michael Eric. 1996. Race rules: navigating the color line. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.

    Read More

  • Racial Profiling in Today's Society

    1740 Words  | 4 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Race-Based Traffic Stops in the US

    1225 Words  | 3 Pages

    “From 2005 to mid-2008, approximately eighty percent of total stops made were of Blacks and Latinos, who comprise twenty-five percent and twenty-eight percent of New York City’s total population, respectively. During this same time period, only about ten percent of stops were of Whites, who comprise forty-four percent of the city’s population” (“Restoring a National Consensus”). Ray Kelly, appointed Police Commissioner by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, of New York in 2013, has not only accepted stop-and-frisk, a program that allows law enforcers to stop individuals and search them, but has multiplied its use. Kelly argued that New Yorkers of color, who have been unevenly targeted un...

    Read More

  • Racial Profiling: Is it Intentional? Can We Correct it?

    986 Words  | 2 Pages

    ...e odds of being searched were 50% higher for black drivers and 42% higher for Hispanic drives than for white drivers. These actions took place despite a finding that white drivers were more likely than minority drivers to be carrying contraband. (p. 78)

    Read More

  • Racial Profiling: An Uncessary Injustice

    2224 Words  | 5 Pages

    Racial profiling is the most idiotic and arrogant thing you can ever do as a person. Usually the people who are affected by racial profiling are minorities, however, any person can be a victim of racial profiling. Some may think that racial profiling is non-existent, however, I would like to bring the situation into focus and show that it is still in existence and has been observed in the past and now in the current year. Although, more than fifty percent of the time racial profiling is conducted it is against a man or woman of color; an African-American in other words. There are instances where a white person can be a victim as well. Trying not to say that there isn't any person out there that is exempted from racial profiling, because there isn't a single person who is just exempted from this cruel method of decision making. In my essay I will talk about racial profiling and what it is, however, you can't forget about where it happens and of course why. Several resolutions will be discussed in this essay to alleviate this problem.

    Read More

  • An Argument Against Racial Profiling by Police

    831 Words  | 2 Pages

    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 ... ...

    Read More

  • An Argument Against Racial Profiling

    1120 Words  | 3 Pages

    There have been many studies and case reports involving racial profiling, particularly racial profiling issues involving traffic stop and seizures. In a study done of reports on the stop-and-searches done on Interstate 95 in Maryland, it was found that 28.4 percent of black drivers and passengers and 28.8 percent of white drivers and passengers stopped were found with illegal contraband. (U.S. Department of Justice) The disparity between the two statistics is a mere .4 percent and shows that race is not an issue. Further reading into the seventy one page report written by the U.S. Department of Justice sho...

    Read More

  • Racial Profiling

    1102 Words  | 3 Pages

    Many instances of racial profiling occur in reaction to specific crimes, making any racial or cultural groups are usually subjected to more intensive scrutiny by the authorities than others groups. The biggest two groups that are mainly affect by racial profiling are the African American and Hispanics. While other groups are also targets they are not as common as the ones in cases of African American. In certain phrases like “Driving while black” and “driving while Indian” comes from complaining that cops are pulling them over for no reason at all. “It affects groups such as Native Americans, Latin Americans, Arabs, Muslims, Asians, and others.” (Gale) Most of these groups have said there are not only targeted by driving, they are also targeted by performing simple tasks that we all do in everyday lives. Some examples of this where a police office has is an African American man standing on a corner waiting for a bus is stopped and questioned regarding why he is standing there and where he is going . Another example of this would be where a police a store clerk will stop a group of Hispanics accusing them of shoplifting. Hispanics and Muslims are suspected to immigration violations or ever worst terrorist. All these things lead into a powerful and sometime regretful aftermath of a

    Read More

  • Mandatory Sentencing

    1772 Words  | 4 Pages

    Oct 1993. Retrieved November 18, 2010. Vol. 79. 134 pages (Document ID: 0747-0088) Published by American Bar Association

    Read More

  • Public Defenders

    2207 Words  | 5 Pages

    Smith, C. E. (2004). Public defenders. In T. Hall, U.S. Legal System (pp. 567-572-). [Ebscohost]. Retrieved from http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook

    Read More

  • Racism In The Justice System Essay

    1377 Words  | 3 Pages

    Even before the stop are made (add comma after made?) cops watch possible suspects of any suspicious activity even without any legal right. “Plainclothes officers known as “rakers” were dispatched into ethnic communities, where they eavesdropped on conversations and wrote daily reports on what they heard, often without any allegation of criminal wrong doing.” (NYPD Racial Profiling 1) This quote explains how even before a citizen is officially stopped by a cop, there are times when that they have already had their personal conversations assessed without their knowledge or without them having done any wrong acts. It was done, based solely on their ethnicity and social status alone. (you can add an example of what the people, who were being watched, were doing) Then (comma?) when police are out watching the streets, they proceed to stop people again simply based on racial profiling. In an article called Watching Certain People by Bob Herbert, stated that “not only are most of the people innocent but a vast majority are either black or Hispanic” (Herbert 1). Racism is happening before the suspect even gets a chance to explain themselves or be accused of any crime, and the rules of being able to do such a thing are becoming even more lenient so that police are able to perform such actions. “The rule requiring police to

    Read More

  • Sexism In The Movie Crash

    1096 Words  | 3 Pages

    A current event that vaguely mirrors police misconduct and the racial prejudice in similar traffic stops like Cameron and Christian by Officer Ryan is the “arrest of Raymond Wiley, a 66-year-old black man”, on Friday morning when he “was stopped by a police officer and ultimately arrested” as he was taking a walk about four blocks from his house, wearing a pair of gloves to pick up any recyclables in his path as he is a scrapper and travels to automobile shops to collect spare pieces of metal for sale (Winkley). He was also “carrying a shortened cane with duct tape” for protection against unleashed dogs he’s encountered previously. According to police officials, an officer spotted Wiley and suspected he was casing nearby vehicles(Winkley). When stopped and searched, the officer found his car keys (which police officials claim could be utilized to break into vehicles) as well as $2,500 in cash. Wiley was soon arrested on suspicion of two felony charges: possession of a baton as well as burglary tools. His lawyer claims the only thing “Wiley is guilty of being black and living in Encanto”(Winkley). The original article, published by the San Diego Union Tribune appears to have no underlying biases, as it gives both sides a platform to tell their story and remains neutral throughout the

    Read More

  • Nonviolent Protests: An argumentative essay

    1414 Words  | 3 Pages

    ... middle of paper ... ... Gonzaga Law Review 33.3 (1998): 653-668. HeinOnline.com -.

    Read More

More about Racial Profiling: Driving While Black is a Real Offense in America

Open Document