Driving While Black/Brown |
New ACLU Report on Racial Profiling Calls for Government Action and An End to Official Denials Wednesday, June 2, 1999 NEW YORK -- Racial profiling of minority motorists is restoring Jim Crow justice in America, the American Civil Liberties Union said today in issuing a new report documenting the practice. In the first comprehensive look at the problem, "Driving While Black: Racial Profiling on Our Nation's Highways," cites police statistics on traffic stops, ACLU lawsuits, government reports and media stories from around the nation in making the case that skin color is being used as a substitute for evidence and a ground for suspicion. For the rest of the story ... http://www.aclu.org/profiling/report/index.html |
| Why Minorities
Run from the Police |
Why do people run from the police? Many American's believe there is only one reason- they are guilty of something. They think someone runs from the police because they have done something illegal, are doing something illegal, or are about to do something illegal. This belief is probably shared by many police officers throughout the United States.(1) But in the United States there may be reasons why a person may run from the police even when they are doing nothing wrong and have nothing to hide.(2) This note focuses on the reasons innocents run from the police. Specifically, this note attempts to explain why minorities, in particular black males, run from the police when they have nothing to hide. It also raises qustions about the attachment of reasonable suspicion to the act of running from the police.(3) |
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Black Cops Against Police Brutality
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| Counterpunch DWB | The issue of racial profiling by police briefly grabbed the attention of the press when New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman recently fired the head of the state police after he accused blacks and hispanics of being more likely to be drug dealers and therefore deserving of heightened police scrutiny. Whitman earned glowing coverage for her swift action. In fact, Whitman has sedulously ignored the problem for most of her term, insisting that racial profiling is not a practice of the state police. Even after two New Jersey state troopers fired eleven shots into a van carrying four black men on their way to a basketball clinic last winter Whitman clung to her contention that the action was not racially motivated. In 1995 a New Jersey state judge threw out charges against fifteen black drivers who, the judge said, had been pulled over without cause. During the trial it emerged that on a 26-mile long stretch on the southern part of the New Jersey Turnpike minorities accounted for 46 percent of the drivers stopped, even though they were only 15 percent of the speeders. |
|
Lundman
& Kaufman |
African Americans who are stopped for traffic violations are less likely than whites to believe the police had a legitimate reason to stop them, and more likely to believe they were mistreated, according to a new national study. In addition, black men are 35 percent more likely than white men to report being stopped by police for a traffic violation. There was no difference between black women and white women in reported stops. The study is one of few to look at the “driving while black” phenomenon on a national scale, and to examine citizen rather than police reports |
| DWB in the UK | Scores of Black Britons -- including prominent athletes, Home Office officials and government workers, artists, lawyers, and business leaders -- have experienced the humiliation of being stopped on the streets of London and other British cities for no other apparent reason than being Black and driving a car. |