Wilkins was a member of the presidential commission that advised President George W. Bush on the establishment of the Smithsonia… The perspective of Mr. Darden – who spent 14 years working closely with police to prosecute accused criminals – is not unique. On the day Wilkin’s was pulled over by a Maryland state trooper, his only crime was “driving while black.” Wilkins recalls that at the time, his Harvard Law Degree nor his role as a public defender mattered. The alleged traffic infraction is not the real reason that the officer has stopped the driver. A laboratory technician at North Bronx Hospital in New York, Gardner was driving with his cousin to visit family in South Carolina when he was pulled over for speeding.
I wanted to know what difference that made,'' Penn said, recalling how he got lost and was turning around on a dead-end street when the officer blocked his van with a patrol car. The ACLU calls on the U.S. Justice Department, law enforcement officials and state and federal legislators to join us in a comprehensive, five-part battle plan against the scourge of racial profiling.Surely Whitman had not forgotten that, for the past five years, her legal department had fought a court ruling that a policy of racial profiling was in operation on the New Jersey Turnpike?
"I don't want my son thinking for one minute that this kind of behavior by anyone in uniform is acceptable. The case is still in litigation, and in April 1999, the ACLU submitted to the court several analyses completed by a team of statistical experts who analyzed databases maintained by the Illinois State Police. 118, the Traffic Stops Statistics Act, requiring the collection of severalIn Arizona, the Phoenix New Times told the story of Larrel Riggs, a 42-year-old marketing executive who was pulled over on a highway by two officers from the Scottsdale Police Department in 1997. Others who drive long distances even factor in extra time for the traffic stops that seem inevitable.Carl Williams, New Jersey's Chief of Troopers, was dismissed in March 1999 by Governor Christine Todd Whitman soon after a news article appeared in which he defended profiling because, he said, "mostly minorities" trafficked in marijuana and cocaine. The idea behind the bill was that if the study confirmed what people of color have experienced for years, it would put to rest the idea that African Americans and other people of color are exaggerating isolated anecdotes into a social problem. The techniques taught and widely encouraged by the DEA as part of Operation Pipeline have been instrumental in spreading the use of pretext stops, which are at the heart of the racial profiling debate. The characteristics of the Markonni profile were behavioral. Don't turn around. Among those telling their stories was Alicia Smith of Oak Park, a 19-year-old African American who was driving to a movie with friends in her hometown when two white officers stopped her without explanation and asked where she was going.
The practice undermines public confidence in law enforcement, erodes the legitimacy of the criminal justice system, and makes police work that much more difficult and dangerous.No person of color is safe from this treatment anywhere, regardless of their obedience to the law, their age, the type of car they drive, or their station in life. Using minor traffic violations to find drugs on the highways is like asking officers to find needles in a haystack. "One prominent victim of the Trumbull profiling was Alvin Penn, an African American Bridgeport Democrat who is deputy president in the state Senate.
But recent Supreme Court decisions allow the police to use traffic stops as a pretext in order to "fish" for evidence. Law enforcement decisions based on hunches rather than evidence are going to suffer from racial stereotyping, whether conscious or unconscious.The pervasiveness of racial profiling by the police in the enforcement of our nation's drug laws is the consequence of the escalating the so-called war on drugs. ... Robert L. Wilkins was a public defender in 1992, when he and several family members were stopped by a Maryland state trooper while … The ACLU calls upon legislators in every state to pass laws that will allow the practice of traffic enforcement to be statistically monitored on an ongoing basis.Today, blacks constitute 13 percent of the country's drug users; 37 percent of those arrested on drug charges; 55 percent of those convicted; and 74 percent of all drug offenders sentenced to prison.On a hot summer afternoon in August 1998, 37-year-old U.S. Army Sergeant First Class Rossano V. Gerald and his young son Gregory drove across the Oklahoma border into a nightmare. Starting in 2002, Wilkins was a partner at the Washington, D.C. law firm of Venable LLP.