Stop Being Racist! "I am a person with an attitude problem. [...] I don't respect uniforms of any kind. I don't like people who think their uniforms give them the right to tell me what to do," said Barry Graham, a white man who was pulled over because he had tattoos and body piercings, but was eventually let go after the police ran a quick background check on him (Driving While Black par. 1-3). From an outsider’s point of view, one would expect the police to detain Graham because Graham possessed characteristics that suggested he could be involved in some illegal activities, and because he was rude to the police officer. Nonetheless, the reality was the opposite. Graham was neither detained nor did he receive any ticket or citation for his …show more content…
The first section of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteen Amendment states that no State may “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Racial profiling, on the other hand, is often defined as law enforcement activities that are operated solely on the basis of race. The unethical and unlawful practice of racial profiling, results in police officers unjustly using an individual’s race or ethnicity as a reason to excessively stop minorities. In a traffic report conducted on the national level for the year 2005, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reveals that “Black drivers (4.5%) were twice as likely as White drivers (2.1%) to be arrested during a traffic stop, while Hispanic drivers (65%) were more likely than White (56.2%) to receive a ticket” (Channin par. 6). The statistics provided by the BJS demonstrate that police actions during street stops were not uniform across racial and ethnic groups. African-American and Hispanic drivers seemed to have a higher likelihood of being pulled over than that of the Whites at the national level. Another article that shows how people of color are the target of racial profiling is “Police Deny Accusations of Racial Profiling with White Teen, Black Dancers” by Ruth Manuel-Logan. In this column, Manuel-Logan describes a recent incident when Houston police stopped and handcuffed …show more content…
In the article “Annals of Law: Rights and Wrongs,” Jeffrey Toobin describes how Charles Bradley, a fifty-year-old African-American security guard from the South Bronx, was frisked by the New York Police Department (NYPD) on a visit to his fiancée’s apartment in Parkchester. Toobin explains that although the police couldn’t find anything suspicious about Bradley, they still “arrested [him] for trespassing,” “strip-searched,” and had him appear in criminal court (41). The police actions, in Bradley’s case, are unethical and unconstitutional. While we trust the law enforcement officers to honor our rights and protect us, many of them abuse their power to humiliate and charge innocent minorities with crimes they have never even committed. What these cops may not realize, however, is that their impulsive and self-indulgent behaviors have domino effects on the victims’ lives. For Bradley, his arrest put him on a verge of losing his job and becoming a homeless man (41). In another article “Driving While Black,” the Phoenix New Times describes a 42-year-old African-American marketing representative, Larrel Riggs, being stopped and had guns pointed at him at around 4:30 in the afternoon. While the police claimed that they pulled Riggs over because he had a questionable license-plate cover, Riggs believed that he was stopped for something as irrationally as DWB-Driving While Black. Although his