African-American Traffic Crimes

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Introduction
The United States of America has the highest incarceration rates of any other country in the world. “This not because of higher crime rates, but because it imprisons more types of criminal offenders, including non-violent and drug offenders, and keeps them in prison longer.”(cite) For many decades, race has been an issue. The mistreatment of African American men has caused uproar throughout history. When a child is born in a inner city neighborhood, predominately black, this should not be a prediction of incarceration or death, but it seems to always end up that way one point in a person’s life. Homes have been broken, fathers have been imprisoned, mothers became hooked on crack, and the child grows up in that same going through …show more content…
In the state of Maryland, for example, African Americans constituted 63 percent of motorists searched by state police on Interstate 95 between January 1995 and January 1999 but only 18 percent of motorists on the road. While it is conceivable that African-American motorists are more likely to commit the types of traffic offenses that police use as pretexts for vehicle checks, traffic studies and police testimony suggest that blacks and whites are not distinguishable by their driving habits. An alternative explanation for the racial disparity in traffic searches is that race is one of the criteria police officers use in deciding whether to search cars. This explanation, known as “racial profiling,” is the basis of several recent lawsuits against state governments. The issue has also attracted attention in political spheres, forcing the resignation of the New Jersey chief of police and provoking the U.S. president to describe racial profiling as a “morally indefensible, deeply corrosive practice” (“Clinton Order Targets Racial Profiling,” Associated Press, June 9, 1999).”(cite from Racial Bias

African American Racial Bias

The incarcerated population is 2.3 million, African Americans now constitute almost 1 million of that 2.3 million (NAACP). Racial bias in the court system has become a huge problem for African Americans but especially African American youths today. Causing the relationship between black communities and law enforcements to slowly parish. Starting with the Trayvon Martin case in 2012, when the unarmed seventeen year old was fatly shot by George Zimmerman who was the neighborhood watch, that found Martin…

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department of justice research paper Civics

There are more African American males being incarcerated and stopped and searched by law enforcement officials, maybe it is because the police are just racially targeting them. Racial profiling by law enforcement is commonly defined as a practice that targets people for suspicion of crime based on their race, ethnicity, religion or national origin. Creating a profile about the kinds of people who commit certain types of crimes may lead officers to generalize about…

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Police Influence On Society

Prior to the Civil War, Blacks were not imprisoned for crimes because they were owned by Whites and therefore, any crimes that may have been construed as crimes were dealt with by their owners. After the Civil War the freed slaves, if they committed a crime, were leased to previous owners to work off their convictions or were sent to the mining fields or railroad buildings, Crutchfield, R, Fernandez, A, and Martinez, J, (2010). Traffic Stops. We have also seen this racial disparity in the Muslim…

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Race And Officer Decision Making Essay

Brown, R. A., & Frank, J. (2006). Race and officer decision making: Examining differences in arrest outcomes between black and white officers. Justice Quarterly: JQ, 23(1), 96-126. Robert Brown and Frank James, both professors of criminal justice at Fayetteville State University and the University of Cincinnati (respectively), considered an officer’s attitude towards a citizen and the treatment of that citizen to be directly related to the race of the officer. This study was implemented under the…

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Essay on Racial Profiling

different in any which way. This abhorrent discrimination between two human beings has not become a relic of the past; rather it still persists in our modern society in some form or the other. From Blacks to Hispanics to Arabs to Chinese to Native Americans, everyone is subjected to racial profiling, even white people. Though Whites are profiled a lot of times by the area in which they live and not the color of their skin. Racial Profiling When law enforcement personnel go about his or her job, he…

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Police Men: Racial Profiling In The United States

conducted a survey of African American police officers in the Milwaukee Police Department to collect data on personal experienced that black police officers had experienced while working with the police department. According to this research, many black officers felt as if they were being singled out because of their race. In this research, a young African American law student at Harvard University wrote a “Bill of Rights for Black Men” (Bain, 2000), after he witnessed a crime being committed. Bain…

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Racial Profiling Pros And Cons

Imagine someone riding in a car, and suddenly they get pulled over for a traffic stop but they end up getting beat by several police officers while they are recording the whole thing happening. For example, Rodney King was a black man who was pulled off of his motorcycle and beaten brutally by several LAPD officers on March 3, 1992. The beating was caught on video and all the officers were put on trial but were finally acquitted after 3 months of trial. Since the beating of Rodney King in 1992,…

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The New Jim Crow Analysis

Incarceration for drug-related crimes is rising at unprecedented rates in the United States as a result of the War on Drugs and the formation of the prison industrial complex. The upsurge in incarceration rates has disproportionally affected poor communities of color, specifically African Americans. This can be attributed to the prevailing stereotypes of blacks as criminals. The concept of racial formation illuminates the inequities present in the criminal justice system in regards to the severe…

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Racial Profiling Essays

Judging a Book by its Cover In September of 2002 on his way home from John F. Kennedy airport in New York, Maher Arar was detained for two weeks by American officials before being deported to Syria where he was tortured for almost a year. Maher is an average law-abiding citizen. He was born in Syria but immigrated to Canada when he was a still young. All his suffering was brought on because he was a Middle-Eastern man who was loosely connected to a suspected member of a terrorist organization…

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Race And Racial Inequality Essay

Race and racial inequality have powerfully shaped American history from its beginnings. It has been a crucial line of division in American society since the settlement of the American colonies in the beginning of the 17th century. Racial discrimination is still present and obvious, as it remains a daily and pervasive fact of life in the United States today. Here we will focus on four domains where discrimination takes place: everyday life interactions; housing; education; and the criminal justice…

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