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Currently, there is not much national data on racial profiling, but some states are examining the matter. For example, New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer reported in February 2000 that 62.7 percent of all people stopped by the New York City Police Department's Street Crime Unit were black. (Interestingly enough, only one in sixteen blacks stopped were arrested, while one in ten whites were arrested.) Evidence presented in 1994 and 1995 in the New Jersey State v. Soto trial showed that although African Americans amounted to only 13.5 percent of the drivers--and 15 percent of the vehicles speeding--along a southern stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike, they constituted 46.2 percent of the people stopped by state troopers in that area. Click here
to connect to an excellent American Civil Liberties Union report on racial
profiling. |