The use of racial profiling has been common in U.S. law enforcement agencies. This racial profiling by police officers often involves routine stops and searches targeting people of color, especially blacks and Latinos. In 1996, a New Jersey state judge ruled that New Jersey troopers had an informal policy of targeting blacks for stops and arrests on the turnpike. According to one study, even though 14 percent of the motorists were black, they made up 46 percent of those stopped and 77 percent of those searched. In the late 1990s the controversy came to the surface after state troopers opened fire on three unarmed black and Latino men in a van stopped on the turnpike. The New Jersey governor and attorney general acknowledged that state troopers used racial profiling. This type of policing involved some state troopers engaging in “spotlighting,” the shining of lights into cars to see the race of the driver. It also involved “ghosting,” the falsification of records to conceal the disproportionate number of motorists of color stopped by police officers (Harry Truman, 1997).
One black dentist in East Orange, New Jersey, has reported that he was pulled over more than fifty times in three years on the New Jersey Turnpike. He finally sold his BMW so that he would no longer attract white officers’ attention. Similarly, Alvin Penn, a black New Jersey state senator, was stopped by police officers while turning his car around on a dead end street. When he asked why he had been stopped, the officer replied that “he didn’t have to give a reason for stopping me and said if I made an issue of it, he would say I was speeding.”
In America in the 1990s, black families continue to be more likely than whites to live in poverty. In fact.......
