I, by no means am a authority on the problems of race. I am a straight, blond haired, blue-eyed, white kid that grew up in a town the size of ten thousand people with only one other black kid, so that may make me the least qualified person to discuss race with any of you, but it is a problem that is very prevalent to our society and it does need to be addressed.
I grew up in Northern Jersey, only a twenty minute train ride from New York City, so I heard all about the issue of racial profiling when the Stop and Frisk law was created a couple years ago. There is some substantial evidence that shows that this law is incredibly discriminatory. According to the New York City Liberties Union website, violent crimes fell 29% in New York City from the years 2001 to 2010, but other large cities such as Los Angeles, New Orleans, Dallas, and Baltimore experienced massive reductions in violent crime without the use of stop and frisk laws by 59%, 56%, 49%, and 37% respectively. These stops were mostly enforced on the people of the black and latino communities of New York City. From 2002 to 2011, black and Latino made up to about 90% of the people stopped and around 88% of those people, more than 3.8 million New Yorkers, were in violation of no crime. One specific example of this is in the neighborhood of Park Slope. Black and Latino make up close to 24% of the population of the neighborhood but account for roughly 79% of the police stops in the area. This seems to be pretty damning for those who support this law.
According to a article by the Washington Post, there does seems to be some bias when it comes to the police use of this power. The police precincts that are responsible for the most stops tend to be home to predominantly black or latino communities while the neighborhoods with the least amount of stops are white communities. Yale professor, describes simply that if crime rate and the number of stops were put on a scatter plot there would be a positive linear relationship basically showing that where there is a higher crime rate there should be more stops but that isn’t the case at all. There are more stops in the neighborhoods of minorities even if there are other communities that warrant more attention.
The NYPD even commissioned a study by the acting director of the National Institute for Justice in order to learn more about the situation. But instead of helping out their case it actually helped to prove the point of the opposition. The black citizens of New York City were stopped at a rate 20 to 30 percent lower than their representation in their crime suspect descriptions, while hispanics were stopped disproportionately more by 5 to 10 percent than their crime suspect descriptions would predict. Also the study stated that black suspects were slightly more likely to be frisked than whites if they were stopped in circumstances similar to other black suspect.
Now the only true argument that could possibly be made in defense of this law is the idea that if the police stop as many people as possible, then the possibility of catching illegal guns and drugs before they do any damage to the community is much higher. But even from the most objective view, there is a ton of evidence that makes the case against the stop and frisk laws.
Even from my little two square mile town, there is a serious problem with racial profiling, and although we don’t have a stop and frisk law in New Jersey, the police in my home town do tend to take a special interest in African American pedestrians. Not one mile from my little bubble of a town is the city of Paterson, which is famous for being one of the most dangerous cities in New Jersey and also for being the hometown of Fetty Wap. And due to the clear lack of racial diversity in my town, the police will keep a special eye on any minority to for fear of a crime being committed in our quaint little town. The funny thing is though that the only major violent crime that has happened in my home town was a bank robbery that was committed by a old white man wearing a bright pink wig and a dress.
Race causes problems for people in a myriad of different ways and one of them is the issue of Racial Profiling.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/08/13/heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-stop-and-frisk-and-why-the-courts-shut-it-down/?utm_term=.457d75546e4f
http://www.nyclu.org/issues/racial-justice/stop-and-frisk-practices