North Carolina Checkpoints Accused Of Racial Profiling
If you’re Latino and traveling anywhere near Asheville, North Carolina, you may want to be aware of the checkpoints – you could be an automatic suspect.
According to a recent article in the citizen-times.com
Warming weather has signaled the start of the “checkpoints season,” a months-long period where local law enforcement will set up sobriety, seat belt and license checkpoints throughout Western North Carolina.
One group of activists has noticed a pattern in this that disproportionately affects minorities, specifically Latinos.
There you go, nothing like summer in North Carolina.
The North Carolina ACLU has gotten itself involved in this, saying that through interviews and anecdotes they’ve found that law enforcement check-points are more likely to be set-up in neighborhoods where the majority of the residents are low-income Latinos.
With racial profiling, there is a presumption by law enforcement that because a person is of a certain race, that individual is more likely to be engaging in illegal behavior, racial justice fellow Raul Pinto said Sunday during the annual meeting of the WNC chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina.
Remember the story of Antonio Hernandez Carranza, the guy that was arrested when cops thought his tortilla dough was drugs? He was stopped at one of these checkpoints. It’s hard to justify law enforcement tactics when you’re arresting someone for possession of ground maize. You can imagine how that arrest affected the relationship between the Latino community and local law enforcement.
A town-hall meeting in Asheville brought these sentiments to light:
“I think that the way that you have seen, specifically with checkpoints, is that it creates this mistrust between the community and the local law enforcement agencies,” Pinto said. “It could play in the mind of the community where an incident like this could be racially motivated.”
Latino advocates and grass-roots groups have set-up hot lines for folks to report abuses and document locations.
Follow Victor Landa on Twitter: @vlanda
[Photo Courtesy davidsonscott15]
