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Racial Profiling And The Civil War On Drugs Essay

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For as long as I can remember, there have always been numerous instances of civil injustices being committed against African American drivers stemming all the way back to the Rodney King Incident in 1991 to as recently as 2015 when a woman was wrongfully arrested in Texas for driving while black. Many people would argue that it is the war on drugs that has caused law enforcement to continually abuse their power, but in actuality the war on drugs is not even specifically targeting narcotics anymore, the government has shifted its interest in violating people and their constitutional rights, with African Americans and Latinos being the most affected by this. It has even shifted the ways that police look for potential criminals on our highways and in our communities, as they are now profiling people due to the color of the skin. This is why the phrase “driving while black” draws parallels to the term “driving while intoxicated” because this is a practice that has become very common by our law enforcement officials. “As we use the term, ‘racial profiling’ occurs when a law enforcement officer questions, stops, arrests, searches, or otherwise investigates a person because the officer believes that members of that person 's racial or ethnic group are more likely than the population at large to commit the sort of crime the officer is investigating. ' The essence of racial profiling is a judgment that the targeted group - before September 11, 2001, usually African Americans or

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