Carl Williams, New Jersey's Chief of Troopers, was dismissed in March 1999 by Governor Christine Todd Whitman soon after a news article appeared in which he defended profiling because, he said, "mostly minorities" trafficked in marijuana and cocaine. Williams' remarks received wide media attention at a time when Whitman and other state officials were already facing heightened media scrutiny over recent incidents of profiling and public anger over police mistreatment of black suspects.
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Since Whren, the Court has extended police power over cars and drivers even further. In Ohio v. Robinette, the Court rejected the argument that officers seeking consent to search a car must tell the driver he is free to refuse permission and leave. Maryland v. Wilson (1997) gave police the power to order passengers out of stopped cars, whether or not there is any basis to suspect they are dangerous. And in Wyoming v. Houghton, decided on April 5, 1999, the Court ruled that after the lawful arrest of the driver, the police can search the closed purse of a passenger even though she had nothing to do with the alleged traffic infraction and had done nothing to suggest involvement in criminal activity.
In Massachusetts, speaker after speaker, including black doctors and lawyers, testified before a legislative committee in April 1999 about being stopped by police officers, apparently because of the color of their skin. The speakers were supporting a bill that would require the state to collect traffic stop statistics to see if blacks were being stopped inordinately. "This is not a new thing for anyone that is black in this city," said Ajibola Osinubi, 44, a native of Nigeria who heads his own advertising and public relations firm in Boston. (Source: Associated Press)
In North Carolina, which recently became the first state in the nation to adopt legislation to help quantify the DWB problem, an analysis by the Raleigh News and Observer found that a highway drug unit ticketed black men at nearly twice the rate of other police units. In most cases, the newspaper reported, the drivers were charged with minor traffic violations and no drugs were found.
In Texas, a 1995 analysis of more than 16 million driving records by the Houston Chronicle found that minority drivers who strayed into the small white enclaves in and around the state's major urban areas were twice as likely as whites to be ticketed for traffic violations. The study found that Hispanics were ticketed most often, though blacks overall faced the sharpest disparities, particularly in the suburbs around Houston where they were more than three times as likely as whites to receive citations. Bellaire, a mostly white city surrounded by southwest Houston, had the widest disparity in ticketing minorities of any city statewide, with blacks 43 times more likely than whites to receive citations there. (Source: The Houston Chronicle)
This class action lawsuit was originally filed in federal court in 1994 after the ACLU of Illinois received hundreds of complaints from black and Hispanic motorists who believed that the Illinois State Police were singling them out for highway drug searches. The case is still in litigation, and in April 1999, the ACLU submitted to the court several analyses completed by a team of statistical experts who analyzed databases maintained by the Illinois State Police. The experts concluded that state troopers, especially those assigned to a drug interdiction program called "Operation Valkyrie," singled out Hispanic motorists for enforcement of the traffic code1:
"The evidence examined in this study reveals dramatic and highly statistically significant disparities between the percentage of black Interstate 95 motorists legitimately subject to stop by Maryland State Police and the percentage of black motorists detained and searched by MSP troopers on this roadway. While no one can know the motivations of each individual trooper in conducting a traffic stop, the statistics presented herein, representing a broad and detailed sample of highly appropriate data, show without question a racially discriminatory impact on blacks and other minority motorists from state police behavior along I-95."
In April of this year, the ACLU of Northern California established a statewide toll-free hotline for victims of discriminatory traffic stops. The hotline number has been publicized on billboards and through a 60-second radio spot. In the first forty-eight hours, the hotline received 200 calls. As of this writing, the count stands at over 1,400.
Historian Noam Chomsky criticized the book and its reception as one-sided by outlining economist Amartya Sen's research on hunger, which revealed that while India's democratic institutions largely prevented famines, its excess of preventable mortality over China, potentially attributable to the latter's more equal distribution of medical and social resources, was nonetheless close to 4 million people per year for non-famine years. Chomsky wrote that "Supposing we now apply the methodology of the Black Book to India, the democratic capitalist 'experiment' has caused more deaths than in the entire history of Communism everywhere since 1917. Over 100 million deaths by 1979, and tens of millions more since, in India alone."[50][51][52] Le Siècle des communismes, a collective work of twenty academics, was a response to both François Furet's Le passé d'une Illusion and Stéphane Courtois' The Black Book of Communism. It broke communism down into series of discrete movements, with mixed positive and negative results.[53] The Black Book of Communism prompted the publication of several other "black books" which argued that similar chronicles of violence and death tolls can be constructed from an examination of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism.[54][55][56]
Le Siècle des communismes, a collective work of twenty academics, was a response to both François Furet's Le passé d'une Illusion and The Black Book of Communism. It broke communism down into series of discrete movements, with mixed positive and negative results.[53] The Black Book of Communism prompted the publication of several other "black books" which argued that similar chronicles of violence and death tolls can be constructed from an examination of capitalism and colonialism.[54][55][56]
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