Our civil rights laws abolished Jim Crow laws and other vestiges of segregation, and guaranteed minority citizens the right to travel and utilize public accommodations freely. Yet today, racial profiling and police brutality make such travel hazardous to the dignity and health of law-abiding black and Hispanic citizens. The system by which lawbreakers are apprehended and punished is one of the pillars of any democracy. Today, our criminal justice system strays far from this ideal. Unequal treatment of minorities characterizes every stage of the process.
Racial disparities affect both innocent and guilty minority citizens.
There is obvious reason to be outraged by the fact that innocent minority citizens are detained by the police on the street and in their cars far more than whites. Those stops involve inconvenience, humiliation and a loss of privacy that is heightened when the rationale for the police action is the color of a motorist's skin or a pedestrian's accent. But there must also be outrage about the disparate treatment of minority citizens who have violated the law. A defendant surrenders many civil rights upon conviction, but equal protection of the laws is not one of them. The treatment of minorities in the criminal justice system is the most profound civil rights crisis facing America in the new century.