Racial Biases in Police Stops

New data realized reveals that Milwaukee police stops are driven by racial biases.  It notes a huge amount of police stops are made without reasonable suspicion as required by law and disproportionately subject Black and Latino people. This is a violation of the 4th Amendment and fostered by deep-rooted stereotypes. To figure this out, David Abrams created a study making it clear that police stops come to racial and ethnic minorities at higher rates than whites, and that factors other than race and ethnicity do not explain those differences. He found even in non-racial factors — including crime rates — traffic and pedestrian stop rates in Milwaukee are both more than six times higher for Black people than for white people. Furthermore, this analysis shows that searches of Black and Latino drivers are more than 20 percent less likely to lead to the discovery of drugs than searches of white drivers — even after controlling for factors other than race and ethnicity. Thus, millions of Black and Latino people are being unlawfully stopped and frisked by police in their everyday lives, showing minorities are still unequal in the eye of law in 2018, a disheartening notion. A factor contributing to this related to Prashad’s article from class is the sudden surge of white supremacy. He remarks this also leads to colonialism, posing an unfortunate possibility in the future. We need to correct this fallacies in our government system to prevent repeating history.

Link: https://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/reforming-police-practices/new-data-reveals-milwaukee-police-stops-are