Hundreds of law-abiding minorities are inconvenienced for every single minority member caught carrying drugs. Drug agents in Buffalo, N.Y., for example, admitted conducting 80 warrantless stops and searches per month at that city s bus station a decade ago in a profiling operation that produced an average of four arrests per month. Blacks and Hispanics were the overwhelming majority of those inconvenienced by these drug agents. Judges, for over a decade, have condemned profiling for its Gestapo-like practice. The Superior Court of Pennsylvania recently criticized the regular police practice of randomly stopping Greyhound buses traveling through Pennsylvania and searching passengers for drugs.
Police repeatedly ignore court rulings curbing profiling.
Maryland State Police promised to end racial profiling in 1995 as part of a court settlement. Yet, minorities continued to comprise 70 percent of the traffic stops by Maryland state troopers on I-95 between 1995 and 1997, a time when minorities comprised only 17 percent of the interstate traffic. This profiling persisted in Maryland despite troopers knowing that their actions were under the scrutiny of court monitors. Last year the ACLU filed a class action lawsuit against the Maryland State Police for their refusal to stop racial profiling. A federal judge fined the Arkansas State Police in August 1988 for failure to comply with a court order to stop profiling.