Free Republic

Yo, this is a pretty wild video out of Charleston County, South Carolina, and it tells you a whole lot about what police officers are faced with on a daily basis. This may seem like your everyday traffic stop — the car being pulled over for swerving — however, the man in the passenger seat is a convicted felon, and officers spoke with him for about five minutes before asking him to get out of the vehicle. Here's what happened when they did that (I'm going to warn you that while you don't see blood, the perp gets smoked in...

Some Thoughts on Recent Tragedies and Racial Tensions Msgr. Charles Pope • July 10, 2016 • For some twenty-four of my twenty-seven years as a priest I have lived in and ministered to largely African-American parishes and communities. It has been a great blessing to me spiritually, liturgically, and personally.As you may imagine, I get a lot of questions from people when racially charged events appear in the news. I’m asked what my parishioners think as well as what I think.This past week began with the death of two African-American men, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, in interactions with...

Civil rights leaders invited to protest against Torrance police profiling By Nick Green, Staff Writer Posted: 03/12/2010 05:51:12 PM PST A group of civil rights leaders, including Al Sharpton, have been invited to stage a protest walk Sunday against what they believe is pattern of racial profiling by Torrance police. The walk will take place at 11:30 a.m. at 190th Street and Yukon Avenue in Torrance, said radio commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson. That's the location where Torrance resident Robert Taylor was stopped and questioned by police on March 4, the day after a violent kidnapping and robbery of an elderly...

The mother of West Side rapper "The Saint," who was fatally shot by police two weeks ago, filed a lawsuit Friday-- the third suit filed by the rapper’s family members in three days. Juanita Wilson, mother of the deceased rapper, is suing for the wrongful death of her son, Freddie Latrice Wilson, according to a suit filed in Cook County Circuit Court Friday. Juanita Wilson is suing the City of Chicago after Freddie Wilson was stopped by police officers on the 100 block of North Lorel Avenue in the Austin neighborhood on Nov. 13. The suit claims four unknown officers...

WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — Black drivers in Delaware pay higher speeding fines than white motorists, a newspaper investigation has found. The investigation by the Wilmington News Journal also found that some police forces ticket blacks in disproportionate numbers. Police agencies with inequities deny they engage in "racial profiling," but could not explain why disparities exist. Some black drivers, however, believe their skin color influenced the police officer. One is Andre Brown of New York, who said he was driving with the traffic flow when a Greenwood officer ticketed him for going 64 mph in a 35-mph zone in 2002.

For a fifth year, Missouri police departments produced numbers showing that, statewide, black motorists are stopped proportionately way more often than whites. But also for a fifth year, those who venture to interpret the numbers cannot agree on what they mean. Russell Gunn, a former state representative from St. Louis, said his observations of police interacting with young black men convinced him long ago that racial profiling is real and that officers target minorities unfairly. "The data back up what has been said all along," Gunn, a Democrat, said after the 2004 figures on 1.36 million stops were released last...

A recent article in the Charlotte Observer reported, "Researchers at N.C. State and N.C. Central universities say an exhaustive study shows there is 'no systemic bias' at work when state Highway Patrol troopers stop motorists along North Carolina's roadsides. . . researchers also note that black drivers are slightly more likely to be stopped and given citations than white or other drivers--perhaps the result of individual trooper bias or possibly reasons unrelated to racial bias." This study confirms the findings of previous inquiries which fail to corroborate the claim that Driving While Black (DWB) is a real phenomenon. It has...