Racial Profiling

In the background of the issue of racial profiling of black and Hispanic persons in New York City in recent years is the modern history and discourse of America in general and New York in particular as a locus of violent crime in the last three decades of the 20th century. In a prescient commentary on crime in the US, former US Attorney general Ramsey Clark analyzes the advent of growth in crime statistics with reference to the phenomenon of change in general and a population explosion in particular. Writing in 1971, he predicts a global population of up to 4 billion; by mid-2000 the actual count was approximately 6.1 billion (Population, 2001). However, Clark's analysis of the psychosocial dynamics of population increase is instructive: "three-fourths of the total [world's population] will be black, brown or yellow. Hundreds of millions will know hunger and many will starve in the remaining years of the century" (Clark, 1971, p. 25).

More generally, Clark notes the significant percentage of violent crime documented among communities of racial minorities. Explaining that the

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ing in 1994 and 1995 interacted with community forces to achieve an unprecedented 'tipping point' in violent and other forms of crime" (p. 1227). New York's mayor at the time, Rudolph Giuliani, as well as Bratton, were credited with much of the turnaround in the city's crime statistics. However, even as the turnaround was going on, controversy arose in respect of certain police practices, with the dynamics of race relations forming the undercurrent of discourse and conflict. Several high-profile cases brought police behavior under great scrutiny, and the issue of whether racial profiling figured into the incidents came sharply to the fore. In 1997, a Haitian immigrant called Abner Louima was arrested outside a nightclub and taken to a Brooklyn police station, where--wrongfully accused of assaulting a police officer--he was beaten and sodomized by Officer Justin Volpe. Volpe pleaded guilty in 1999 to violating Louima's civil rights. Three other officers who were present and who appear to have assisted Volpe were later convicted for covering up that crime, but their convictions were overturned in 2002. However, by 2000, both the politicians who initially defended the officers as wrongfully accused and the NYPD bureaucracy and rank
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Some common words found in the essay are:
York City, Americans Clark, America Negroes, Ramsey Clark, Kelling Bratton, Jersey Turnpike, Furthermore NYPD, Retrieved March, Constitutional Rights, Larceny TOTAL, racial profiling, york city, crime statistics, retrieved march, violent crime, retrieved march 4, march 4 2004, 4 2004, march 4, hentoff 1998, aggressive policing, pretext stops, issue racial profiling, kelling bratton 1998, retrieved march 14,
Approximate Word count = 3026
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)