Tag: racial profiling

BET aired its interview with President Obama on race tonight. (Warning: video plays automatically.) It's called "BET News Presents: A Conversation with President Barack Obama."

More Ferguson grand jury documents were released today.

The ACLU responds to DOJ's new racial profiling guidelines. It also points out that allowing racial profiling near the border is a bad precedent.

Protests continue around the country.

Eric Holder will announce the Obama Administration's new racial profiling rules next week. There will be curbs on racial profiling by law enforcement, including the DEA.

Exempted will be most of the Department of Homeland Security (TSA, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Protection)which will still be allowed to use racial profiling at airports and at the border.

Apparently, the plan was also to ban DHS from racial profiling, but they objected and were for the most part exempted. [More...]

Nicholas Pert is about to graduate from the Borough of Manhattan Community College. He's also been stopped, frisked and searched more than five time. He relates his account in a New York Times Op-Ed today. He's also going to be a witness for the Center of Constitutional Rights in its lawsuit seeking to prevent the NYPD from making racially motivated stops.

For young people in my neighborhood, getting stopped and frisked is a rite of passage. We expect the police to jump us at any moment. We know the rules: don’t run and don’t try to explain, because speaking up for yourself might get you arrested or worse. And we all feel the same way — degraded, harassed, violated and criminalized because we’re black or Latino. Have I been stopped more than the average young black person? I don’t know, but I look like a zillion other people on the street. And we’re all just trying to live our lives.

As to why he decided to testify: [More...]

If you thought racial profiling was on the way out, think again:

The Justice Department is considering letting the FBI investigate Americans without any evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on a terrorist profile that could single out Muslims, Arabs or other racial and ethnic groups.

.... Currently, FBI agents need specific reasons — such as evidence or allegations that a law probably has been violated — to investigate U.S. citizens and legal residents. The new policy, law enforcement officials told The Associated Press, would let agents open preliminary terrorism investigations after mining public records and intelligence to build a profile of traits that, taken together, were deemed suspicious.

Among the factors that could make someone subject of an investigation is travel to regions of the world known for terrorist activity, access to weapons or military training, along with the person's race or ethnicity.