this issue, because the polarity of opinion between Scully and Darden mirrors the opinions of those who either support or refute the contention that race affects traffic stops. On the one hand, we have Scully who argues that police officers do not stop vehicles without probable cause and that minorities need to understand stopping someone with probable cause is not a violation of rights regardless of race or skin color. In response to an ACLU media campaign, which features two black men panicking over being signaled to pull over by white officers even though they have done nothing wrong, Scully argues, “I think it’s a little bit outrageous. I think what the ACLU should be doing rather than alarming the black community is educating the black or brown or minority community that being pulled over by police officers really isn’t violating your civil rights if they have probably cause to do that.”
Scully argues that the ACLU is sending the wrong message with campaigns like this and that even though racial profiling exists, his experiences on the force demonstrates to him that traffic stops are made because of a valid reason not due to race, “On my way to work here I think I could have pulled over 50 percent of the drivers for violating some traffic violation. As a former police officer, there was not racial profiling. People were pulled over because of probable cause.” Scully further argues that officers seldom know the race or even gender of a driver before pulling them over, especially at night. He argues that the reason many people believe racial profiling does occur in traffic stops is because of highly publicized isolated incidents, “I think what we’re finding here is you have a couple incidents that happen in this country, a couple of tragic incidents, and unfortunately, people take advantage of those to really raise the conscience of the community.”
Christopher Darden, on the other hand, thinks media...