speeding. When the trooper asked to search the car and its contents, Wilkins refused. But the trooper set loose a drug-sniffing dog to comb the car’s exterior, including the windshield, the hubcaps, and the taillights while Wilkins and his family stood in the rain. No drugs were found. The Wilkins family was completely humiliated. They were humiliated. They were later awarded a $95,000 settlement from the Maryland State Police, as well as an agreement by the agency to keep records to help prevent discrimination (Jones 38-40). Statistics on racial profiling are controversial, but in a recent study, Temple University Professor John Lamlberth determined that about 75 percent of the motorists and traffic violators along one stretch of U.S. Interstate 95 were white, but 80 percent of searches were of minorities. The attitude of certain high-ranking law enforcement officials also helps to compound the problem. For instance, New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman fired the state police superintendent; Carl Williams for saying that while he did not condone racial profiling, minorities were responsible for most of the country’s illegal drug trade (Cannon 72). Statistics confirm that African Americans-particularly young black men-commit a dramatically disproportionate share of street crime in the United State. This is a sociological fact, not a figment of a racist media (or police) imagination. In recent years, victims report blacks as perpetrators of around 25 percent of violent crimes, although blacks constitute only about only about 12 percent of the nation’s population. Statistics such as these make it seem as if racial profiling is not the result of bigotry, and that the factual claim upon which the practice rests is sound. But, racial profiling is still wrong because racial distinctions are and should be different from other lines of social stratification. That is why, since the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, courts have typically ruled-based on the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause-that mere reasonableness is an insufficient justification for officials to discri

Some topics in this essay:
African Americans-particularly, Union ACLU, Bill Clinton, Harvard-educated Washington, Tonya Haggerty, Racial Profiling, Robert Russ, John Lamlberth, racial profiling, Carl Williams, African-American Hispanic, police departments, law enforcement, traffic stop, kinnon 62-66, federal funds, withdrawing federal funds, data voluntary, withdrawing federal, voluntary basis, traffic stop data, funds police, stop data voluntary, statistics racial profiling, data voluntary basis,