According to the Fourth Amendment, police can wrongfully stop and detain an individual if they need an affordable suspicion that the person is doing, has done, or is near to doing against the law. Over the years, however, the department of local government has adopted a method that encourages cops to prevent and question principally minority voters initially and to return up with reasons for having done so later. This has resulted in folks in some neighborhoods being stopped while not reason lots of times a year. as a result officers' area unit offered no clear parameters relating to the World Health Organization to prevent and frisk and the area unit was instead left to swear nearly entirely on their own judgment, implicit biases, which can be subconscious, have a profound impact on their decision-making.
Racial stereotypes subtly influence an officer’s call relating to whom to prevent and frisk. many studies can demonstrate that implicit bias affects somebody's selections, even if they don't have any aware bias toward a precise cluster. These studies will examine however the officer’s implicit bias toward African Americans will cause him to target African American suspects once considering crime and might influence the cop’s perception of whether a person is armed. once a large level of discretion is granted to officers, implicit biases can influence an officer’s call.
The Supreme Court established the initial parameters of stop and frisk in Terry v. Ohio (Schwartz). though several police departments before this call had used stop and frisk, its legal validity had been unestablished and untested. The Court was tasked with processing what recognized a stop and frisk (as hostile a tutelar arrest and full search), and if such a policy was subject to constraints beneath the Fourth modification. Established precedent and Constitutional interpretation relating to the Fourth Amendment had long commanded each search and/or seizure needed grounds, which needs that the officer possess a moderately high customary of proof that crime was afoot before being even to act (Laser, 1995).
In Terry, the Supreme Court broke with presiding precedent as it ruled stop and frisk did fall within the Fourth Amendment’s purview, but that the traditional Fourth Amendment protections did not apply. It lowered the requisite amount of suspicion necessary to perform a stop and frisk from probable cause to reasonable suspicion. They created a narrow caveat within the established Fourth Amendment doctrine, allowing a certain type of search and seizure to be exempt from the heightened scrutiny applied to its doctrinal counterparts. In July of 1999 10% of the African-American population in Tulia, Texas, a small town of 5,000 in the Texas Panhandle, was arrested on drug charges solely on the testimony of a single undercover officer.
The arrests of 46 people, 39 of them black, resulted in 38 convictions for various drug charges with sentences of up to 90 years in prison. In early April 2003, a Dallas judge threw out all 38 drug convictions from Tulia because they were based on questionable testimony from a single undercover agent accused of racial prejudice. On June 16, 12 of the defendants remaining in the case (most of the others accepted plea bargains in order to avoid lengthy prison sentences), were freed after Texas Gov. Perry signed a bill authorizing their release.
The officer responsible for the racially motivated arrests is Tom Coleman, a Texas cop with a checkered past and a self-declared fondness for racial epithets. At the time, Coleman was working for the Panhandle Regional Narcotics Task Force, one of an estimated 1,000 drug task forces operating across America with very little oversight or accountability. According to Randy Credico of the William Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice, which was instrumental in bringing Tulia to the public's attention, 'The Panhandle task force was the beneficiary of Coleman's lies.
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The more busts he made and the more convictions he helped win, the more federal grant money the task force received This is surprising since Coleman kept no written records, not a single photograph was taken, no video was shot, and no one observed his buys. Every ensuing conviction relied only on his word. According to the Court's findings, Coleman submitted false reports, misrepresented his investigative work, and misidentified various defendants during his investigation.
A pilot removed an Arab American Secret Service agent from a flight on December 24 2001 when the agent was on his way to President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. The agent had asked the airline to call the Secret Service for verification, and even after the local transit police had affirmed his identity, the pilot still stopped him from boarding the flight, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
An American Airlines spokesman claimed that the inconsistencies in the paperwork the agent filed were the pilot's basis for removing the agent. American Airlines supported the pilot's action and dismissed the suggestion that the removal was the result of racial profiling. The pilot released a statement saying that the agent was confrontational and abusive.
Federal Aviation Administration regulations allow a pilot to remove anyone from a flight on the ground of a security risk. However, the Department of Transportation has received about 20 complaints concerning the removal of passengers because of their religion and ethnicity. The agent has not ruled out the possibility of filing a lawsuit against American Airlines and has demanded an apology.
Now there is a big difference between racial profiling and good police just trying to do their jobs, but society and the media can twist things, unfortunately. Recently released data compiled by the Los Angeles Police Department as part of a federal consent decree show that the city’s officers are more likely to ask black and Latino drivers to step out of their cars after stopping them than their white counterparts. Once out of their cars, members of these minorities are more likely to be patted down or searched. The media will say the cops discriminate against minorities which in fact they don’t however the department does.
To compare stop, search, and arrest data to demographics, as cop critics would have us do, is absurd. The police don’t formulate their crime strategies based on census findings; they go where the crime is. For example, last year a man with a gold tooth was robbing and viciously beating up pedestrians in Mid-City. Victims identified him as either a dark-skinned Latino or a light-skinned African American. Accordingly, if an officer made a traffic stop in the area and noticed that the driver had a gold tooth and was black or Latino, the driver probably would have been asked to step out of his car, frisked, and possibly even taken to the station house for a line-up (Barron).
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