Essay On Racial Profiling

924 Words4 Pages
Racial profiling has been an issue in the United States ever since the civil rights movement. Even though African Americans are said to be treated “equally” in the United States, as all other races are supposed to be, they, and many other different races along with them are still faced with scrutiny from day to day for the color of their skin, which leaks over to the ways that law enforcement conducts duties. Steps must be made to combat racial profiling, so the United States can truly live up to its word as an equal nation. However, it will take a change of perspective in many people. There are two possible solutions to this. In particular, the thing that needs to change is the attitudes and practices of law enforcement, because…show more content…
“Yet, while almost all agreed that it was impermissible to stop or search someone solely on the basis of race, some in law enforcement urged that reliance on race, in conjunction with other factors, was legitimate, even if race was not part of a specific suspect description”. However, Rudovsky notes that while there may have been successes with stops by law enforcement only by the basis of race, there have been much more failures. “Yet, in these states as in others, the rate of stops and searches of African-American drivers, which ranged up to 60-70% of the stops, was vastly disproportionate to both the rate of drug possession and the number of minority drivers”. This shows that most of the people that have been stopped in instances of racial profiling were actually doing nothing wrong. These traffic stops rarely go documented, however. You don’t hear statistics concerning the number of traffic stops regardless of crime. You just hear about the ones that have resulted in a bust, arrest, violation of the law, the list goes on and on. And police flash these statistics in a shining
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