The New Jim Crow: The Fourth Amendment

Within Chapter 2 of The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander talks about the Fourth Amendment, which warrants against unreasonable search and seizure, which is rarely mentioned today. I then realized that the problem now is that we are not told about our civil rights and liberties, which results in our loss of agency and power. This especially happens to more disenfranchised groups such as African Americans and Latinos, in addition to other racial and ethnic groups deemed “suspicious”. To those who believe that it is fair for black people to be unfairly targeted as “criminals”, is it fair for Latinos in Arizona to be stopped and checked for a green card to make sure that they’re not “illegal”? Is it justifiable for Muslim and Arab Americans to
Robinette case, the US Supreme Court overruled the Ohio Supreme Court. The Ohio court wanted to require police officers using traffic stops (motorists pulled over for alleged traffic violations) as an excuse for conducting drug searches, to tell the offenders explicitly that they are free to leave the scene if they so choose, before asking for permission for the search. The state court wished to impose a limitation on the disturbing and by that time common police practice; the US Supreme Court would have none of it. Such court rulings emboldened the police to push the limits of what they could do, without much fear of adverse legal consequences.
The federal oversight of the War on Drugs is provided by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which in close cooperation with countless many state and local law enforcement agencies provides training and federal guidelines (e.g. appearance and behavioral profiles of those considered to be promising suspects). At the core of the method used to interdict people involved with illegal drugs are (high) volume sweeps, typically involving traffic stops and consent searches, targeting in practice individuals who give no particular cause for suspicion, but belong to disfavored
SWAT teams had been (rarely) utilized from the 1960s for high-profile emergencies, such as hostage situations and hijackings, and later to combat terrorism. From the 1980s many SWAT teams were formed with federal help in localities, to be used primarily and with increasing frequency for serving drug warrants on suspected drug dealers. The SWAT raids, often ruthlessly carried out in minority communities, became very common (40,000 deployments in 2001) and resulted in many unwarranted and unjustified fatalities, trauma and other damage. The transformation from community to military policing began with the passing by the Congress in 1981 of the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act; the act authorized police forces of several different types to access a variety of military facilities and resources, for the purported purpose of drug interdiction. Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton enthusiastically continued the drug policies of the Reagan administration. The size of federal disbursements to the police of a given locality was linked to the number Drug War arrests made