Why Are Police Targeting Minorites for Stops?
It is early in the morning, and the well-dressed young African-American man driving his Ford Explorer on I-75 sees the blue lights of the Georgia State Patrol car behind him. The officer pulls behind the sport utility vehicle and the young man's heart begins to sink.He is on his way to Atlanta for a job interview. The stop, ostensibly for speeding, should not take long, he reasons, as the highway patrol officer walks cautiously toward the Explorer. But instead of simply asking for a driver's license and writing a speeding ticket, the trooper calls for backup. Another trooper soon arrives, his blue lights flashing as well.The young man is told to leave his vehicle, as the troopers announce their intention to search it. "Hey, where did you get the money for something like this?" one trooper asks mockingly while he starts the process of going through every inch of the Explorer. Soon, an officer pulls off an inside door panel. More dismantling of the vehicle follows. They say they are looking for drugs, but in the end find nothing. After ticketing the driver for speeding, the two officers casually drive off. Sitting in his now-trashed SUV, the young man weeps in his anger and humiliation.
Here, before having evidence of a particular crime, police set out intending to investigate a high proportion of people of some particular race, ethnic group, age group, or so on. The memo told park rangers "to develop probable cause for stop. Federal law provides for up to five years in prison for attempting to prevent one's own property from being grabbed. This Is Your Law Enforcement on Drugs In the panic created by the drug war, our traditional liberties have been eroded. But this doesn't mean their propensity to carry is the same. He was relieved of $147,000 by the DEA while traveling on Amtrak. These minority men, no matter how law-abiding they are, know that they will be investigated by the police significantly more often than other citizens who are not members of their racial group. The practice of laying out broad dragnets to see what turns up would almost entirely disappear but for the attempt to stamp out drug trafficking and use. The insurance company is not making any statement about the particular circumstances of any particular man, but merely generalizing about the class of 40-year-old men. In 1998 alone, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation took back $1. " (One's mind boggles at how the police are able to detect that two Hispanics are "posing" as a couple as they zip by at 60 miles per hour. As John Derbyshire points out, the laws rushed onto the books to end racial profiling result in severe obstacles to police officers attempting to investigate serious crimes.
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Acceptance Essays
