While the police officers claimed their stops were for legitimate traffic violations, only nine of the 1.084 detained motorists received traffic citations. The Volusia County Police department would not initially release the videotapes, denying they even existed. Police are not required to keep record of initial stops, while every other step of an arrest or detainment process is recorded. Here, there were videotapes that showed these stops, and the scenes shown were terribly race-motivated traffic stops. More alarming were the comments and actions made by the police officers themselves.
Constitutional violations can be extremely difficult to prove in court.
Should the DEA reveal its arrest statistics, courts would not know whether those statistics reflected racially selective investigation by the DEA or the asserted disproportionate racial involvement. A clear example of an innocent victim who took the right steps toward a successful claim against a police department is Mr. Robert Wilkins. While returning to Washington, D.C. from a funeral in Chicago, Robert Wilkins was stopped by a Maryland State Police officer. After citing Mr. Wilkins' cousin, Scott El-Amin, for allegedly driving sixty miles an hour in a forty mile an hour zone, the officer attempted to gain consent to search the vehicle and the passengers refused. The officer then made the family wait for a narcotics dog and made the family wait in the rain while the dog sniffed the car and found nothing.