Racial profiling, the war on drugs, and urban poverty

Racial Profiling, The War on Drugs and Urban Poverty

Everyday, throughout the country, unmotivated searches occur, especially on the nation's highways (Anderson Pp). Many believe that complaints are unjustified and merely exaggerations of hypersensitive minorities, and that if law enforcement do pull over and search the vehicles of African-Americans disproportionately, "then such racial profiling is an unfortunate but necessary component of modern crime fighting" (Anderson Pp).

The general explanations for racial profiling tend to focus on institutional racism, despite the change in social attitudes during the last forty years (Anderson Pp). The practice of racial profiling appears to grow from a several sources, "all attributable to the War on Drugs, that $37 billion annual effort on the part of local, state, and federal lawmakers and cops to stop the sale and use of "illicit" substances" (Anderson Pp). The sources include the difficulty in policing victimless crimes in general and the resulting need for intrusive police techniques; the greater relevancy of this difficulty given the intensification of the drug war since the 1980s; and the additional incentive that asset forfeiture laws give police forces to seize money and property from suspects (Anderson Pp).

There is no single, universally accepted definition of "racial profiling," yet it the term is generally used to designate the practice of stopping and inspecting persons in public places, such as motorists on public highways or pedestrians in airports or urban areas, "where the reason for the stop is a statistical profile of the detainee's race or ethnicity" (Anderson Pp). For example, in 2000, federal law enforcement instructed the U.S. Forest Service officers in California's Mendocino National Forest to question all Hispanics whose cars were stopped, regardless of whether or not drugs were found in their vehicles (Anderson Pp). According to the memo, park rangers were "to develop probable cause for stop...if a vehicle stop is conducted and no marijuana is located and the vehicle has Hispanics inside, at a minimum we would like all individuals field interrogated" (Anderson Pp). A 1999 report by Chad Thevenot of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, a group that monitors abuses of the American legal system, states that "76% of the motorists stopped along a 50-mile stretch of I-95 by Maryland's Special Traffic Interdiction Force (STIF) were black" (Anderson Pp). According to an Associated Press computer analysis of car searches from January through September 1995, blacks constituted "25% of Maryland's population, and 20% of Marylanders with driver's licenses" (Anderson Pp).

New Jersey held hearings concerning racial profiling in which one state police investigator testified that 94% of the motorists stopped were minorities (Anderson Pp). Not only were minorities more likely to be stopped than whites, but more often than not are pressured to allow searches of their vehicles, and are more likely to allow such searches (Anderson Pp). In March 2001, the New York Times reported that a 1997 investigation by New Jersey police of their own practices found that "turnpike drivers who agreed to have their cars searched by the state police were overwhelmingly black and Hispanic" (Anderson Pp).

Although African-Americans and Hispanics have been the targeted victims of racial profiling, since the September 11th attacks, Arab-Americans and visitors from Middle Eastern countries also find themselves the target of racial profiling due to their ethnicity and the global profile of terrorists (Barnes Pp). Many believe that racial profiling is an appropriate tool for the war on terrorism and polls indicate a strong majority favor "subjecting those of Arab decent to extra scrutiny at airports" (Lund Pp). Surprisingly, polls showed that "blacks and Arab-Americans ere even more likely than whites to favor such policies" (Lund Pp).