Police Killings: Racial Profiling In The United States

At least 303 lives of African Americans were lost due to police shootings in 2016. Why is this number so high and why is it growing? Many people believe the brutality of police and authorities has grown stronger in the past several years towards those of color, and that it is becoming incorrigible. Back in 2012, the life of Trayvon Martin was lost suddenly due to a watch captain of the neighborhood, George Zimmerman. Zimmerman had claimed to see a “suspicious person” and was directed to stay in his SUV, however those orders were not followed.

The article “Do American cops have a race problem? Or a class problem?” written by Damon Linker in 2015, identifies why there seems to be a high number of African Americans being fatally shot. In just over seven months over 500 people have been killed at the hands of the police. To put all this into context in the United Kingdom the police have killed 52 people since the year 1900. The U.K. is not drastically less prone to violent crimes, however it is a much smaller country.

A person’s race or ethnicity should not be a probable cause during a traffic stop. Not to mentioned, the “Supreme Court has turned a blind eye to the use of pretextual stops on a racial basis” (2009, pg. 291). In other words, officers are free to act on the assumption that being black increases the probability that an individual is a criminal. No wonder blacks view the criminal justice system as being biased against

To summarize the article “Racial Profiling is Morally Wrong and Based on False Assumptions”, by James A. Kowalski, he argues that racial profiling is by no means effective, or good. It solves no problems, and causes people to fear law enforcement. Racial profiling is when an individual is suspected of a crime by law enforcement because of their race, ethnicity, religion, or national origin. For example, “all blacks are gang members”. In addition to Kowalski’s arguments, he references the Zimmerman case from 2012 as an example of racial profiling gone wrong.

It seems like all you see on TV today is about police and Racial Profiling. Police have always been accused of racial profiling but now that social media and the media is involved it has added fire into the pot that has led to law enforcement to have a bad name which is not fair to all the cop there who don’t do racial profiling. The media and social media have gather the attention of everyone with the black lives matter movement the black live matter movement started when an officer shot and killed a black male and has continue and has kept growing every since. for suspicion of crime based on the individual 's race, ethnicity, religion or national origin. Criminal profiling, generally, as practiced by police, is the reliance on a group of

As a result, there is a drastic increase of violent outburst between both sides. For the last years, it was reported that 51.5 percent of black were killed by police officers (ibtimes.com). On the other hand, there have been 51,548 assaults against law enforcement and it resulted in 14,453 injuries in 2015 alone (nleomf.org). In the United States, recently, police brutality has been a popular subject all over the news and social media.

“In a survey on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, citizens said that young black men are 21 times more likely than their white counterparts to be shot dead by police” (Trumbull 16). This is not the case! In my opinion, they are saying this as a result of not paying attention to the “white shootings” that happen everyday.

In Table 2, they gathered data on racial differences facing the police. One of the questions they asked was “Just your impression, are blacks in your community treated less fairly than whites in dealing with the police, such as traffic incidents?” Table 1 and Table 2 together supported racial splits on their personal thoughts and conflicts with the police. Another one of Weitzer and Tuch findings were that 39% of blacks had unfavorable views about their local police than 12.8% of whites and 30.3% of blacks had unfavorable views of the state police than 7.7% whites (2002). Their findings show that blacks see profiling as more pervasive, with 81.6% of blacks feeling this way versus 60.2% of whites (Weitzer

James A. Forbes, an interdenominational minister in New York, once said, “When people rely on surface appearances and false racial stereotypes, rather than in-depth knowledge of others at the level of the heart, mind and spirit, their ability to assess and understand people accurately is compromised.” Forbes is saying that many humans judge by the color of the skin on the outside, rather than the fact that there is no difference on the inside. Humans also rely on the actions of those before that person with the same skin color. Unfortunately, humans do not try to get to know who a person really is and the personality of that person, they just assume that all African Americans are alike and not their own person. Statistics state that minority

The most common form of racial profiling occurs when police stop, question, and search. Although racial profiling is commonly known to happen to members of racial minorities. Its proven to happen more often to only African Americans. In 1996, a television network aired a report titled “driving while black”. In the show three younger black males, were paid to drive around a city in a Mercedes-Benz.

Unrest, Ferguson, segregation, riot and #BlackLivesMatter are just some of the words that kept its firm place on front-pages of media outlets despite other issues concerning the United States. Recently, with the start of shooting of Trayvon Martin, there have been constant racial profiling cases that have led to many fatal shootings affecting blacks, many of them merely being in their youth. So, what really is “Racial Profiling”? It is an enduring, and extremely concerning problem that have been facing the United States for decades, despite conservative’s claims that it has already entered a “Post-racial era”. This practice involves law enforcement officers, who target individuals or groups on suspicion of crime based on their race and ethnicity.

Racial profiling has always been an issue in the United States, although we as a society tend to ignore it, it is still occurring around us everyday. Data has proven that racial profiling is an issue, it shows that, “Racial profiling is real. Disparate treatment of black and brown men by police officers is real. Grotesquely disproportionate numbers of killings of black men by the police are real” (Blow). Blacks are the number one race that is being killed by police officers; the numbers of the killings are drastically high.

It is possible that minority citizens are more likely to perceive racial profiling when stopped by a white officer than they would be if the officer were a minority (Cochran & Warren,

There have been numerous attempts at lessening racially biased policing, but it still exist and is a very big social problem. The extremity of racial biased policing is upsetting for me being an African American mother of two males, who have already experience this at a young age of nine and eleven. The misconduct that authority have for poor and color people is life or death, times have not change. People of color and poverty are still fighting for equality and change is overdue. I am here to take a stand and not allow racially biased policing corrupt my family lives or my life.

Random sample surveys were conducted in Seattle, Washington by telephone, which asked citizen’s various questions concerning their feelings towards police. These questions included their level of happiness in regards to police problem-solving, their views on police hassling citizens, and if they had ever experienced, or perceived to experience racial profiling or bias by law enforcement (Wu, 2014). Of all the citizens that took part in the survey, 64% of African Americans felt that racial profiling was a problem inside their neighborhoods, 28% of Asians, 20% of whites, and 34% of Hispanics agreed (Wu,