Racial Profiling

Two New Jersey state troopers admitted to opening fire on a van occupied by four minority men. State officials later acknowledged the incident as a case of racial profiling. Targeting minorities as drug couriers and using race as a pretext for stops is a long standing practice used by some, but not all, law enforcement agencies. In 1986 the DEA launched "Operation Pipeline", a highway drug interdiction which, by the summer of 1999, had trained roughly 27,000 police officers in 48 states participating in the program. Techniques taught by the DEA encouraged the wide use of pretext stops in order to search vehicles for drugs. The training used in conjunction with Pipeline implicitly encouraged the targeting of minority motorist. .
             Media coverage of racial profiling has been around for the past decade, but only in recent years has it entered the national spotlight. The media's fascination of a social problem does not necessarily make it "real", nor does lack of media coverage make a real problem non-existent. Although, dozens of stories by the press and on television, along with statistical reports, lawsuits, and the recent legislative action being taken, it is hard to disagree that racial profiling is not a problem. The following stories will further prove this:.
             In California in 1997, San Diego Chargers football player Shawn Lee was pulled over with his girlfriend, they were both handcuffed and detained for a half an hour on the side of Interstate 15. The officer told Lee he was stopped because his vehicle fiot the description of a stolen car earlier that day. Lee was driving a Jeep Grand Cherokee, a sports utility vehicle, the reported stolen car was a Honda sedan.(p.9).
             In 1996, two officers in police cruisers followed George Washington and Darryl Hicks as they drove in the parking lot of the hotel they were staying at in Santa Monica. The men were ordered out of their car at gun point, handcuffed and put in separate police cars while the officers searched the car, without consent of owner or warrant, and checked their identification.