Racial Profiling!
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Racial Profiling!
| Mon, 04-05-2004 - 2:13pm |
White women more likely ticketed when pulled over.
By IAN DEMSKY
Staff Writer
Ticket in hand, Richard Taylor stood outside Nashville traffic court and spoke his mind about who he thinks gets a ticket and who gets off with a warning when stopped by police.
Most likely to get a ticket?
''Young black men,'' said Taylor, 39, an African-American.
And most likely to get a warning?
''Old white people,'' he said.
But a Tennessean analysis of Metro police traffic stop data from 2003 shows that perception is not true.
According to the data, white women were most likely to get ticketed when pulled over by police — 93.3% of the time. By comparison, black men were ticketed 88.2% of the time they were stopped.
FULL STORY:
http://www.tennessean.com/local/archives/04/04/49397254.shtml?Element_ID=49397254

Maybe things are changing.
This article is a few years old. The NJ incident was widely publicized.
Driving While Black
>"Whitman also kept her mouth shut in early February when Emblez Longoria, a New Jersey state trooper, filed suit against his department claiming that he was being pressured to make illegal stops of black and hispanic drivers in order to fulfill his arrest quotas. Longoria, who is hispanic, alleges that he was denied promotions and harassed by his superiors when he refused to pull over drivers using racial profiling. Ultimately, Whitman's hand was forced by the racist remarks of Col. Carl Williams, the head of the New Jersey state police. Responding to a report showing that 75 percent of all motorists arrested on the New Jersey Turnpike in the first two months of 1997 were minorities, Williams told the Newark Star-Ledger that cocaine and marijuana traffickers were most likely to be either black or hispanic. Williams was canned, but don't expect much more action than that. The investigation of his Department has been in the hands of Attorney General Peter Verniero, who has fiercely denied that New Jersey cops use profiling. Black leaders in New Jersey have demanded that Verniero's investigation be taken up by an independent panel. But Whitman has refused and instead has nominated Verniero for a spot on the New Jersey Supreme Court."<
>"The problem is not merely one of racist cops, but of a policing system that encourages and promotes racial typing. In Amherst, Massachusetts, the police department held seminars for its officers on "perpetrator profiles". The officers were told that "interracial couples" were more likely to be engaged in drug dealing than white couples.
In San Diego, the police are ever vigilant to pull over black people driving expensive cars. In October of 1997, a black man named Shawn Lee and his girlfriend were stopped by the California Highway Patrol on Interstate 15. Lee, a member of the San Diego Chargers football team, and his girlfriend were handcuffed and held by police for more than an hour. The patrolman said that they were detained because Lee was driving a car that fit a description of one that had been reported as stolen that night. This story was false. Lee was driving a new Jeep Grand Cherokee. The stolen vehicle was a Honda."<
Quotes from..........
http://www.counterpunch.org/drivingblack.html