One example of this discrimination is from the movie Twelve Angry Men. The frightened, teenaged Purto Rican defendant is on trial, as well as the jury and the American judicial system with its purported sense of infallibility and fairness. The jurors didn't care about the boy's age and his family - most of them only wanted him to be sent to the electric chair because he was a foreigner who also lives in one of the worst parts of town. The September 11 terrorist attacks is another example that brought on many suspicions against those of Arab ethnicity. According to a wide range of civil rights and human rights organizations, the expansion of racial profiling after the September 11 attacks appears to have contributed to a climate of discrimination that indirectly encourages hate crimes against certain minority groups and people who look like them by conveying the message that such discrimination is acceptable and helpful in fighting terrorism. In the fight on terrorism, racism remains a major element in the culture and practices of police departments. Many police authorities use racial profiling as a tool to pick up anyone they suspect is carrying arms and/or drugs. Since the onset of the "war on drugs" in the mid-1980s, Black Americans have been arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned for drug law offences at rates grossly out of proportion to their numbers among drug offenders. Although drug use and selling cut across all racial, socioeconomic and geographic lines, law enforcement strategies have targeted street-level drug dealers and users from low-income, predominantly minority urban areas. For a variety of reasons, it is easier to make arrests in these neighborhoods as contrasted with, for example, suburban neighborhoods with mostly white populations. Records of past statistics make officers believe they have a sufficient amount of evidence to incriminate anyone who fits these standards.
