Attention

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent our advertisers

Saturday, May 07, 2016

Driving While Black: Cops Target Minority Drivers in This Mostly White New Jersey Town

Anecdotal experience suggests that race matters when you get behind the wheel: minority drivers are more likely to get stopped and pulled over by police than white drivers.

A group of law students at Seton Hall University in New Jersey recently tested that conventional wisdom. When New Jersey police officers issue a traffic ticket, they are required to fill out driver's name, age, eye color, residence, license plate, and so on, but are not required to record their race or ethnicity. Determining whether tickets were being issued disproportionately to black or Latino drivers meant that the researchers had to collect that data themselves. They spent four weeks last October sitting in on traffic court hearings in Bloomfield, a small township in New Jersey.

The hearings take place twice a day. Researchers sat in on about 70 hours of hearings and observed 855 ticketed individuals, according to their report. During their observations, they made note of the ethnicity, age, gender, and area of residence for each person who showed up.

Bloomfield is an affluent, predominantly white suburb that lies northwest of Newark. CNN Money once deemed it "one of the best places to live" due to low crime rates, and it's beendescribed as the kind of town that evokes a particular kind of American sentimentality — duck crossing signs, picnicking families, ice cream parlors, and little chapels with green lawns.

The selection of the town was fairly random, according to Mark Denbeaux, the professor who led the study out of the law school's Center for Policy and Research, which he directs. Students wanted to look closely at a border town, meaning one that is surrounded by a variety of demographics, and one that was easily accessible from Seton Hall.

More/Video

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

This nonsense has come up time and time again. When they did a study where cameras were placed timing cars, they found that most of the speeders were black

Anonymous said...

It's also a fact that most black people abuse the handicap spaces when they don't have a placate or handicap plate. Can't tell you how many times I've see black people without handicap plates parking in the handicap spaces out in front of both Walmarts. And no. No one was 'sitting' in the car either. But on occasion when I've sat there waiting for the culprit to come out, 8 times out 10 it's a black person. They abuse everything with their entitlement mindset. Just gotten ridiculous.

Anonymous said...

Marxism always attacks the Law enforcement of their targets ..this is more than racial ..it is an agenda

Anonymous said...

So? Profiling works. Might hurt your feeling but it works. Each area has to profile for their own safety.