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It was late one mourning, and the well- dressed young African American male was driving his Ford Explorer on I- 85, sees the blue lights of the Georgia State patrol car behind him. The officer pulls behind the sport utility vehicle. The young mans heart is beating like thunder. He is on his way to Norcross for a job interview. The stop, obviously for speeding, should not take long, he reasons, as the highway patrol officer walks cautiously toward the Ford Explorer. But instead of simply asking for a drivers license and writing a speeding ticket, the trooper calls for backup.
Another trooper arrives speeding, his blue lights flashing as well. The young man is told to exit the vehicle and sit in the back of the patrol car, as they announce their intention to search it. Hey, where did you get the money for something like this? referring to a palm pilot as one trooper asks mockingly while he starts the process of going through every inch of the Explorer. Only minutes later, an officer pulls off an inside panel door. More dismantling of the vehicle follows.
The driver had an idea about what was going on. Eventually, they say they are looking for drugs. But in the end, they find nothing. After ticketing the driver for speeding, the officer casually drive off with a look on his face that said you may have gotten away this time, Ill remember who you are and I will catch you the next time. Sitting in his now trashed sports utility vehicle, my brother murmurs in his anger and humiliation.
Unmotivated searches like this are daily occurrences on our nations highways and there is more contacts between African Americans and law enforcement than there are between police and whites when officers initiated contact. Many conservatives, on the other hand, feel such complaints as the exaggerations of overly sensitive minorities. Or they say if traffic cops do in fact pull over and search vehicles of African Americans disproportionately, then such racial profiling is an unfortunate but necessary component of modern crime fighting. The incident above should give pause to those who think that racial proofing is simply a bogus issue cooked up by black leaders such as Al Sharpton and Rev.
Jesse Jackson to use as another publicity tool. More often than necessary black men and even some black women can tell stories of having been stopped pulled over in the late model car and searched for drugs solely because they fit the description. Even as incidents of racial profiling are widely condemned today, there is little said about the actual root cause of the phenomenon. The standard explanation for racial profiling focus on institutional racism, but that idea runs contrary to the sea change in social attitudes that has taken place over the last four decades. Although there is no single, universally accepted definition of racial profiling, I am using the term to designate the practice of stopping and inspecting people who are passing through public places- such as drivers on highways or people in airports- where the reason for the stop is a statistical profile of detainees race or ethnicity. The practice of racial profiling has been a political gain topic for the last several years.
In an address to congress I remember President George W. Bush report that hed asked the Attorney General to develop a specific recommendation to end racial profiling. It is wrong, and we will end it in America. The nomination of former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman as head of the Environmental Protection Agency was challenged on the basis of her alleged complicity in racial profiling practices in the Garden State.
Whitman had pioneered her own unique form of minority outreach when she was photographed frisking a black crime suspect in 1996. Copies of the photo were circulated to senators prior to her confirmation vote. By the same token in February 1999, Whitman fired State Police Superintendent Carl A. Williams after he gave a newspaper interview in which he justified racial profiling and linked minorities to drug trafficking.
More recently Eleanor Holmes Norton, District of Columbia non-voting member of Congress, has tried to introduce legislation that would withhold federal highways dollars from states that have not explicitly banned racial profiling (Huxley). Although some observers claim that racial profiling doesnt exist, there are a lot of stories and statistics that prove the practice. I have heard of a case where law enforcement officers involved U. S.
Forest Service officers in one of California's national forest last year. Trying to stop marijuana growing, forest ranger were told to question all Blacks and Hispanics whose cars were stopped, regardless of whether pot was actually found in their vehicles. However, some official have defended racial profiling as nothing than sensible police techniques, where police employ laws of probability to make the best use of their scarce resources in attacking crime. John Derbyshire, a commentator, put in his short story, In defense of Racial Profiling, the police engage in the practice for reason of simple efficiency: a policeman who concentrate a disproportionate amount of his limited time and resource on young black men is going to undercover far more crimes and therefore be far more successful in his career than one who biases his attention toward say a middle-aged Asian women. Racial profiling has some irreversibly effects on some individuals.
Amaduo Diallo, an unarmed immigrant street vendor from Ghana, was shoot several times and killed by five white New York City police officers. In court, one officer said that Diallo fit the description of rapist who had been terrorizing that neighborhood for the past year and he thought that he was reaching for a gun. Most recent in Cincinnati, Ohio, Timothy Thomas, 19, was chased into an alley and fatally shoot in the chest at close range. Again, the cop pursued Thomas because he fit the description of an individual sought by the police for 14 warrants; all of them were for misdemeanors and traffic violations. In conclusion, if we wish to end the practice of racial profiling, we must address its roots, drug laws that encourage police to consider member of a broad group as probable criminals. We must redirect law enforcement towards solving specific known crimes using the particular evidence available to them about a crime.
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Research essay sample on African Americans And Law Enforcement
