By Sophie Warnes
At the weekend, YouTube stars Adam Saleh and Sheikh Akbar made a video to prove a point about how differently they were treated in the US while wearing cultural clothing. But they aren’t the only ones being victimised just because of how they look.
This weekend YouTube stars Adam Saleh and Sheikh Akbar made a video exposing how racial profiling works in New York. When the two pushed each other around and pretended to fight in Western clothing, they were completely ignored by a police officer. Several minutes later they did exactly the same thing in traditional Arabic Muslim clothes – and got the reaction above.
They aren’t the only ones being victimised just because of how they look or dress, though: it’s a problem all over the state and affects many people. Usually it’s because of skin colour and this one stat shows the big problem with the practice.
Just 12% of those stopped and frisked were white… but whites make up 44% of New York’s population
Suspicions that there is some element of racial profiling going on are somewhat justified.
Black people were disproportionately over-represented among those who were stopped and searched.
While they make up just 25.5% of the population in the whole of New York state, police recorded that of those they stopped and frisked, 53% of them were black.
The Latino population is the only ethnicity which seems to be represented as expected. Roughly 7,500 of those stopped (28%) were Latino, and they make up 28.6% of the population in New York.
[Source: NYCLU, 2010 Census for New York]
New York adopted “Stop-and-frisk” in 2002
New York Civil Liberties Union estimates that there have been about 4 million stopssince then. In the first half of this year alone, there New Yorkers were stopped 27,527 times. Of these, 82% of them were totally innocent.
And it’s not just New York
British police are six times more likely to stop someone who is black than someone who is white. And, in fact, the government, a Tory government, wants to restrict stop & search – because that low arrest rate is just not a good use of police time.
Source: Mirror
