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Under pressure from civil rights groups and Congressional Democrats, the Justice Department will revise its stance on racial profiling, reports The New York Times. That revision will restrict officials from considering religion, national origin, gender and sexual orientation in their investigations. The Justice Department has been working on the revision for several years. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder himself has spoken out about his intention to modify the Department's definition of racial profiling, including in a 2010 speech where he pledged to end racial profiling "once and for all." "Racial profiling is wrong. It can leave a lasting scar on...

Civil rights leaders such as the Rev. Al Sharpton and retail executives have hammered out a list of rules that will be tacked up inside stores to ensure that black shoppers will not be racially profiled and targeted just for buying a pricey item. Six weeks after the Daily News reported on a series of racial-profiling allegations from black shoppers, a coalition of high-end retailers and civil rights leaders came up with a “bill of rights” to protect customers from “shop-and-frisk” practices. The list was released to the media after getting final approval Monday morning at a meeting that included...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) COLUMBUS, Ohio - It was a rally organized by gun-control supporters, but by the end, it looked more like an NRA rally. "As a gun owner, I'm a responsible person and I think it's responsible to ask to have all gun owners have a background check," said Blanche Luczyk. "It's just common sense. Any responsible person who is willing to take the ownership of a gun should be willing to have that background check." Luczyk was one of a half dozen members of the group Mayors Against Illegal Guns who hosted the rally in the Arena District on Friday....

Trayvon Martin's father Tracy arrives at a Congressional Caucus on Black Men and Boys forum Wednesday, July 24, 2013, on Capitol Hill. Rep. Conyers, D-Mich., introduced the End Racial Profiling Act Tuesday, July 30, 2013, alongside longtime supporter Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md.Democrats in Congress hope the Travyon Martin tragedy can help them accomplish something they have worked on for years to no avail: an end to racial profiling. "Trayvon is one of too many individuals across the country who have been victimized by a perception of criminality simply because of their race, ethnicity, religion or national origin. These individuals are...

I am sure there will be many commentaries from the right this weekend opening with Chris Matthew’s self-righteous apology on behalf of “all white people” for the incidents of racial profiling black men have had to endure in the United States. As a Christian American black man, I feel the need to respond individually to Mr. Matthews: You can keep it! I am not interested in empty gestures. “But let every man prove his own work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another. For every man shall bear his own burden.” Galatians 6:4,5 I...

The polarizing racial and legal debate over George Zimmerman's acquittal in the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager in Florida has been turned into a national political issue that's not going away anytime soon. President Obama's made sure of that in his public plea to the nation Friday to "do some soul-searching" over what led to the killing of this 17-year-old and whether we can "learn some lessons from this and move in a positive direction." I've been one of Obama's persistent policy critics from the beginning of his presidency. But I have to say I found his measured,...

In the wake of the shooting of a Nazi officer, Police Capt. Louis Renault played by Claude Rains in the 1942 movie "Casablanca," ordered his men to "round up the usual suspects." Was Renault engaging in some sort of profiling? He may have been, but what is profiling? Let's look at it. We can think of profiling as a method to economize on information costs by using easily observed physical characteristics as a proxy for some other characteristic more difficult or costlier to observe. For example, say you seek to hire people to manually unload trucks containing heavy merchandise. I'm...

President Obama rarely misses an opportunity to insert himself into an issue. Last Friday, he appeared in the White House press room to comment on the George Zimmerman verdict. The president said he could have been Trayvon Martin. Not likely, given his private schooling and the way he was fast-tracked to success. The president said the history of African-Americans partially explains the way many black people view the case. He spoke of blacks hearing car doors lock as they cross the street and of white women who clutch their purses tightly when a black person enters an elevator. Then he...

Eric Holder is going to hate this. The same day the Attorney General was condemning the “underlying attitudes, mistaken beliefs and stereotypes” that create racial strife, the City of Indianapolis was implementing the single largest case of racial profiling in the history of this country. This Friday and Saturday night, the streets of downtown Indianapolis will be full from some of the 250,000 black people attending the annual Indiana Black Expo. Much like George Zimmerman knew that black people were responsible for a crime wave in his town, city officials “know” the Black Expo has a ten-year history of intense...

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) are readying a flurry of bills in response to George Zimmerman’s acquittal on charges in last year’s fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin. The lawmakers are drafting proposals intended to rein in racial profiling; scrap state stand-your-ground laws; and promote better training for the nation’s neighborhood watch volunteers, among other anti-violence measures. . . . Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), head of the CBC, decried “the presumption of guilt so often associated with people of color.” . . . [Rep. Frederica] Wilson said she’s also working on legislation offering financial incentives to states that repeal...

Why did the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman case become a national obsession? After all, about 14,000 murders take place every year in America. In just one city, Chicago, President Barack Obama’s adopted hometown, murders are on pace to reach around 400, down 27 percent from last year but on par with 2011. In 2012, only 26 percent of homicides were “cleared,” meaning the case was closed, with or without the killer being arrested or charged. That Martin, a black person, was killed by Zimmerman, described as a white Hispanic, is rare. Most homicides are same-race crimes. Most black killers kill other...

On the defense after the City Council passed a pair of bills designed to curb the NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk tactic and other alleged abuses, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said today that his critics had it backwards when they accuse the police of stopping too many black and Latino men. In fact, he bluntly declared the opposite to be true if viewed through a lens of who commits murders. “I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little,” Mr. Bloomberg argued during his Friday morning WOR radio show with John Gambling. “It’s exactly the reverse of what they say....

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio will appeal a federal judge’s ruling that his agency systematically singled out Latinos in its trademark immigration patrols, marking the first finding by a court that the agency racially profiles people. Tim Casey, the lead attorney representing America’s self-proclaimed toughest sheriff in the case, said an appeal of the finding that the agency racially profiles people was planned in the next 30 days. The decision by U.S. District Judge Murray Snow in Phoenix backs up years of allegations from Arpaio’s critics who say his officers violate the constitutional rights of Latinos in relying on race...

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said Thursday the investigation into the Boston Marathon bombings shows how difficult and sensitive the issue of racial profiling can be. Speaking with young students in Denver, Sotomayor noted that some people asked whether authorities had done enough to track the two suspects, both ethnic Chechens. “Is that profiling? Could be,” she said. “Is it something you just can't ignore? Maybe sometimes not.” …

The immigration bill senators introduced Wednesday bans racial profiling by federal law enforcement officers in most routine encounters, such as traffic stops. Under current federal law and court precedents, racial discrimination is illegal — but there is no specific ban on racial profiling by federal officers. But buried inside the 844-page Senate immigration bill is a section specifically prohibiting the use of race or ethnicity as a factor in “routine or spontaneous law enforcement decisions, such as ordinary traffic stops.” Still, that language already represents a compromise. An earlier draft of the bill, reviewed by The Washington Times, had applied...

If you thought the Newtown, Connecticut shooting was one place where a refuge from racial politics could be found, you were deeply mistaken. At least one commentator on MSNBC is determined to bring the subject up. In a conversation on MSNBC’s Up With Chris Hayes, Salon columnist David Sirota argued that the discussion surrounding the shooting in Newtown has been spared a larger degree of ugliness by the fact that the shooter in this case – Adam Lanza – was a white man. However, Sirota did not see this as a positive. Rather, he saw it as evidence that America...

The buzzword in police stations and courtrooms this week is racial profiling -- the practice by police of stopping drivers based solely on the color of their skin. The issue has been spotlighted after a federal court judge asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the Mount Prospectr police department of possibly racially targeting Hispanic drivers and violating their civil rights. The allegations of racial profiling arose during a trial in federal cour in which a former Mount Prospect police officer was awarded $1.2 million for being discriminated against. He was fired in 1995. The outcome has raised the...

As the railroading of George Zimmerman makes clear, we are all equal, but black hoodlums are a lot more equal than half-Jewish “white” Hispanics. They may soon become more equal still: When a 911 caller reported gunfire in the Ferndale community last month, he didn’t imagine that his description of the shooter would renew claims of racial profiling against the North Charleston Police Department. The resident, who is black, told a dispatcher that the gunman had dreadlocks in his hair, but in an interview Wednesday with The Post and Courier, he said it could have been “twists, braids or dreads.”...

Right now, there isn't enough known about the circumstances surrounding the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a black, by a 28-year-old part-Hispanic, during his neighborhood watch tour in an Orlando, Fla., suburb. If evidence emerges that Zimmerman's actions were not justified, he should be prosecuted and punished; however, there's a larger issue that few people understand or have the courage to acknowledge, namely that black and young has become synonymous with crime and, hence, suspicion. To make that connection does not make one a racist. Let's look at it. Twelve years ago, a black Washington, D.C., commissioner warned cabbies,...

(CNN) -- A U.S. district judge ordered New York City to pay $128 million in to firefighters who allege the city used an entrance exam that deliberately sought to keep African-Americans and Latino Americans off the force. The judge also ordered the FDNY to hire 293 black and Latino applicants. "It has been in the city's power to prevent or remedy the need for damages proceedings for a decade, and it has not done so," U.S. District Judge Nicholas G. Garufis said in his ruling on the class action lawsuit. He called it the "consequences of the city's decision to...