Racism In The Criminal Justice System

In the United States of America, we live in a day and time where society is getting worse by the minute. One of the contributing factors to the times worsening, is Police Brutality due to Racial Profiling. Since 2012, after the Trevon Martin case there has been numerous cases of Police Brutality due to the person’s skin tone. There is no specific reasoning behind these cases, but Police feel as if they are superior because of the “gun and badge”. Minority groups have been facing profiling and brutality since the times of segregation, nevertheless Police Brutality is what we as society have grown accustomed to.

Ethical challenges are of universal span; many people including police officers are confronted with the opportunities for violating organizational rules and norms daily. Most of the stories about police officers in the media, including Cops and Criminal Minds, are about respectable police officers, but the intense 2001 movie Training Day is not. Alonzo Harris, a veteran police officer with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), is training Jake Hoyt, a rookie officer on his first day with the narcotics unit. Harris’ character is an example of police officers’ potential for corruption. For instance, when Harris misuses the police authority and uses some fake arrest warrant seizing millions of dollars from a former LAPD veteran, now an informant

Racial profiling can be isolated into two implications, hard profiling and delicate profiling. An example of hard profiling would be the time when an officer sees a dark individual and without additional to go on, pulls him over for a hunt on the likelihood that he may conveying medications or weapons. Racial profiling would a case like when the state police get a tip off that a particular nationality is trafficking drugs down a specific expressway and get a kick out of the chance to drive a specific sort of vehicle, and from this insight the trooper pulls over a man coordinating this

Wilson was violent toward Brown and shot Brown several times even though Brown had already surrendered and put up his hands in the air. People who are on Brown’s side claim that a white police officer abused his power, and a sign of race discrimination among police officers. On the day of shooting, Michael Brown and Dorian Johnson went to Ferguson Market and Liquor Store where it was reported for robbery. According to Johnson 's attorney, Freeman Bosley, Michael was involved in shoplifting(CNN). The police released the video of Brown robbing and pushing a clerk of the store from the convenience store 's security camera.

Many of the areas that individuals yell racial profiling are destitute high crime areas, which typically have a large African American community. This would make it seem as though the police harassing African Americans, even though they are not. According to Dempsey and Forst, “biased-based policing is a form of discrimination that singles out people of racial or ethnic group due to the belief that these groups are more likely than others to commit certain types of crimes” (335). If one wants to look at this closer than one would need to go back to the UCR that shows that it is not African

Racial profiling has had great effects on African American communities all over the US. Victims of racial profiling incidents and people who have witnessed have begun to fear and hate the police when they should be trusting that they are there to keep them safe. Many incidents have occured in the US where unarmed black individuals have been brutally killed by the hands of white police or have been pulled over when driving because they have commited the crime of “driving while black”, which in today's world has become something that African Americans have to fear because of the likeliness of them being pulled over by police, because of their racial bias towards them. “Driving while black” is something that black families tell their kids to be careful of at a young age because of their own experiences with police. In between 2007-2010, people of colored skin accounted for 75 percent of the people stopped by Boston police and 65 percent of them were black in a city whose population was made up of 25 percent African Americans at that time.

Questions still arise today about the disproportionately high numbers of people of African descent killed, beaten, and arrested by police in major urban cities of America. Since the mid-1900s the words law enforcement and policing have been used interchangeably. In order to understand the present, one must understand the past relationships between law-enforcement and African-Americans. The Webster’s Unabridged Deluxe defines black as of the darkest color; opposite of white ; a Negro; dirty; evil; wicked; without hope. This definition alone associates African-Americans with the stigma of being criminal and no good.

Throughout history, disputes and tensions between law enforcement officials and communities of minorities have endured hostility and violence between each other. Racial profiling has become a “hot topic” for researchers as well as for politicians and by now it is likely that most citizens are at least aware of the common accusations of racial bias pitted against law enforcement (Cochran & Warren, 2013). Communities of color are being discriminated against and racially profiled by white police officers for any suspicion of criminal activities. It has been widely assumed by policy makers and citizens alike that allegations of racial profiling are mostly associated with the policing practices of white officers and their treatment of racial and ethnic minorities (Cochran & Warren, 2013). Also, individuals of minority descent will certainly recognize that they are being racially profiled during a stop that is being conducted by a white police officer.

Judges, prosecutors, public defenders and the police, while all working to ensure the safety of the public, have conflicting priorities. The police have the incentive to make countless arrests, increasing their arrest rate by aggressively pursuing minor crimes with poor evidence, fabricating stories to discredit the offender and deny the victims. Similarly, the prosecutors have the incentive to convict the defendants brought to them by the police, which is made infinitely more difficult by the influx of weak cases they receive. In the case of the Central Park Five, the moment the DNA evidence was discovered to not match the boys’, the investigation should have been stopped, or at least paused, and moved in a different direction; it is highly improbable that the boys did not leave a single track on the scene, and equally, or more, improbable that the scene did not leave a single trace on them. However, even with the lack of matching DNA evidence, the boys were still convicted of the crime; they had confessed to the crime.

When dealing with different crimes, people of color are reflected in the demarcation of “them” and “us”. Whites are often represented as the “good guys”, or the strong, law obeying citizens. Meanwhile They often target people of color, sometimes without any sort of evidence at all. Writers and directors use racial stereotypes to make a more complex story with more

Racial profiling can cause multiple problems. Several law enforcement agencies have gone through expensive litigation over civil rights concerns. Police-citizen relations in those communities have been strained, making policing all the more challenging. Most importantly, racial profiling is unlikely to be an effective policing strategy as criminals can simply shift their activities outside the profile (e.g., if racial profiling begins with police stopping black males in their teens and twenties. The "cumulative impact of racial discrimination accounts for the special, way that blacks have of looking at and evaluating" their experiences in public encounters (Feagin, 1991:115).

This violence and crime has turned tourist city into a war zone for the past decade and it paints a terrible picture for a city whose main financial income is its tourists. The black on black and police on black violence can be solved over time by a multitude of means one of them being the coming together of the African American community to protect themselves from racism, stereotypes, crime and self-inflicted

Moreover, this type of issue has been sighted throughout history, although some negative police force cases falsely informed of the higher power. Such as cases from ancient times where laws did not apply to them. As this progressed, worsening through the 1800’s to the late 1900’s, the wrongly using the police force has affected many including the community’s trust in the Justice system. One such case titled as, Escobedo v. Illinois, where a law enforcement arrested a suspect for obtaining a confession to a previous murder, in which they undoubtedly ignored telling the suspect about is right to remain silent or the right to have a consultation with his attorney. Providing using methods as “....they confronted him with an alleged accomplice who accused him of having perpetrated a murder…”

Violence and Racism have erupted like a volcano in our society. Not only has it become a problem with the public, it has now become a problem in law enforcement. The very people who protect the public are mistreating citizens of their own country. Racist police brutality has become a controversial topic of modern times, with police killing innocent citizens. The stories have kept popping up so much that is starting to be recognized as a major problem.

There is no doubt that there is police brutality. In the old case of Rodney King, it was a clear case of police brutality the police should be prosecuted and put into jail over something of that nature. There are police who feel too empowered and feel like they gen do anything without.