The purpose of this research is to examine the issue of racial profiling of African Americans ad Hispanics by police agencies in New York City. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which the issue has arisen in recent years and then to discuss the public perceptions of police performance in the matter, as well as the impact of such perception on law enforcement in New York City.
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 typical citizen might be the victim of violent crime at the rate of once every 400 years, Clark says that statistics show that "the poor black urban slum dweller faces odds five times greater--one in eighty" and that violent crime, which in any case is often unreported in ghettoes, has a high incidence in minority communities.
Violent crime in the black ghetto is probably reported less frequently than anywhere else in America. Even so, Negroes, composing at ...