Tag: Race Matters

SURVEY: Cops More Likely To Search Blacks & Latinos During Traffic Stops

A recent report by San Diego State University found that San Diego police officers were more likely to search African-American and Hispanic drivers, despite the fact that they were less likely to be found carrying contraband than white drivers.

The study looked at 260,000 traffic stops in 2014 and 2015.  It also found that blacks, Hispanics and Pacific Islander drivers were also subjected to more field interviews than white drivers.

The study found that race and ethnicity were not major factors in who police pulled over, but they were important factors in who they decided to search, the station reported.

The SDSU report also included 10 major recommendations that included: acknowledging that racial and ethnic disparities exist and make combating those disparities a priority; enhancing police training surrounding racial and ethnic disparities; making traffic stops more transparent; increase community engagement and strengthening accountability and oversight of data collection and management.

The study, released earlier this month, came at a time when relations between law enforcement and minority communities have been strained across the country.

Late last week the city issued an official response to the report questioning a slight difference in total traffic stops during the period in question; a disparity in report figures related to traffic stops of Hispanics during daytime and nighttime hours; questions about the report’s context for missing data and unexplained changes in monthly traffic stop volumes, and other items in the report.

On Wednesday night, San Diego police Chief Shelley Zimmerman released a statement, which read, “I am proud of our department personnel who come to work each day with the desire to make a positive difference. We enjoy a tremendous partnership with our community and that is why we are one of the safest big cities in the United States.

“We want every citizen to feel safe in their community, feel valued in their opinion, and feel listened to by their police Department. We will used these recommendations to strengthen, enhance and foster new relationships with our community we so proudly serve.”

Truthfully and unfortunately, these surveys are more validating than informative. Clearly racial profiling has and will always exist in these U.S. streets, its the Amerikkkan way!

Read the full SDSU Traffic Stops report

FEATURED POST: Why Racial Bias Still Pervades America

That race remains one of our most vexing national issues – from bias in the sharing economy, to the lack of diversity in the executive ranks to the violence that plays out daily between communities and the police – comes as no surprise to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson. “There is a direct line between our history and the headlines you see today,” she says. “And nothing will improve until we address that history.”

It took her 15 years and over 1,200 interviews to finish The Warmth of Other Suns, the massive and beautifully rendered account of the slow but steady migration of six million African Americans from the violent repression of the Jim Crow South, to the North and West in search of a better life. The Great Migration lasted between 1916 and 1970 and reshaped America in ways that we are just now starting to understand.

It was a tough road. “The migrants were cast as poor illiterates, who imported out-of-wedlock births, joblessness and welfare dependency wherever they went,” Wilkerson writes.

Wilkerson’s extraordinary reporting, however, tells a different and more nuanced tale – one of risk, hard work, and achievement despite racial barriers that still exist in some forms. “It’s hard to imagine what it would be like if there was no Great Migration,” she says. “So many aspects of what we view as American culture were affected by this unleashing of pent up, unrecognized talent, creativity and ability, that had been withheld for centuries.”

An astonishing number of prominent African American executives, artists or athletes either are, or are direct descendants of, someone who took that perilous journey.

In a recent conversation, I asked Wilkerson to help explain what we get wrong about the Great Migration, and why it is imperative that business leaders closely study the difficult history that shapes our world in unseen ways.

“If there are disparities in how African Americans are making their way in the business world, and they are encountering barriers and assumptions, it is a direct manifestation of the unaddressed history of the world in which we all live. History can be a tremendous guide, and more of a comfort than people can imagine.”

Read the entire interview here, it has been lightly edited for clarity.

Hillary Clinton Says White People Need To Start Listening To African-American Concerns


The tragic killings of black men at the hands of police officers this week is no doubt going to make fodder for politicians during this election year.

The presidential hopeful is taking the opportunity to put her outrage on full display.

Huffington Post:

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said on Friday that white people must do more to understand the experiences that African-Americans have had with police officers.

Speaking with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Clinton made the remarks in response to questions about why she believes she’s more qualified than presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump to close the racial divide in America.

“I will call for white people, like myself, to put ourselves in the shoes of those African-American families, who fear every time their children go somewhere, who have to have the talk about … how to really protect themselves, when they are the ones who should be expecting protection from encounters with the police,” Clinton said.

“I’m going to be talking to white people. I think we are the ones who have to start listening to the legitimate cries that are coming from our African-American fellow citizens, and we have so much more to be done, and we have got to get about the business of doing it,” said Clinton. “We can’t be engaging in hateful rhetoric or incitement of violence. We need to bring people together.”