Racial Profiling

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Racial Profiling

Racial profiling occurs when the police target someone for investigation on the basis of that person’s race, national origin, or ethnicity. Examples for profiling are the use of race to determine which drivers to stop for minor traffic violations and the use of race to determine which motorists or pedestrians to search for contraband. Racial profiling is prevalent in America. Despite the civil rights victories of 30 years ago, official racial prejudice is still reflected throughout the criminal justice system. For people of my color in cities larger and smaller across the nation, north, south, east, west, Jim Crow “justice” is still alive and well.

We as a whole need to stand together to fight racism no matter what kind it is. Today skin color makes you a suspect in America. It makes you more likely to be stopped, and more likely to be searched, and most likely to be arrested and imprisoned. By being of another skin color it gives grounds of suspicion by law enforcement officials. Tens of thousands of innocent motorists on highways across the country are victims of racial profiling. And these discriminatory police stops have reached epidemic proportions in recent years- fueled by war on drugs that has given police a pretext to target people who think fit a “drug courier” or “gang member’ profiling.

The pervasiveness of racial profiling by the police in the enforcement of our nation’s drug laws is consequence of the escalating the so call war on drugs. Drug use and drug selling are not confined to racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S.; indeed five times as many whites uses drugs. But the war on drugs has; since it’s earliest days targeted people of color. Other people see us as the reason the drugs are here, but if you do your research it will show that the black man did not bring it here.

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