Racial profiling

            For my research paper I chose the topic of racial profiling and law enforcement. In my research I found that racial profiling has its down sides but is not as bad as some people make it out to be. Racial profiling can be a used as a basis for racist police offers to arrest more minorities and this is documented very often. Racist police use racial profiling as a reason to stop, question, and detain minorities in traffic stops and elsewhere on their job. Their abuses have been well documented, in the book Driving While Black by Kenneth Meeks the author shows many examples of abuse of racial profiling. Meeks talks about the New Jersey highway patrol and how anti-racial profiling activists have used the highway patrol in New Jersey as an example of how using racial profiling is a racist activity. In the book he gives the example of Samuel Elijah the black construction worker who was stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike while driving home from a job site in Willingboro. Samuel had been stopped for nothing and was run though a sobriety test which he passed. The book Driving While Black also talks about the incident where a black family who was driving from Illinois back to their home in Washington D.C. Robert's cousin was driving while the passengers slept as they drove through Maryland when the car was pulled over by a Maryland state trooper. Robert was asked to step out of the car and asked to sign a consent form to search the vehicle. Robert being an attorney with the public defenders office in Washington D.C. step out identified him self as an attorney and asked what the problem was. The officer told them that they had problems with rental cars on this highway. Robert then told his cousin that he did not have to sign the form and that the officer was violating there constitutional rights. The officer said he would have to get the dog out there to make sure there were not any drugs .