Slate: New Jersey Provides a Road Map for Fighting Racially Biased Traffic Stops

Slate: New Jersey Provides a Road Map for Fighting Racially Biased Traffic Stops by Aliza Hochman Bloom (“When the Supreme Court struck down the use of race-conscious admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina last term, the conservative justices behind the decision robustly claimed to seek the end of racial discrimination, espousing a view that ‘eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.’ Meanwhile, Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted a major irony: Despite claiming that consideration of race violates the guarantee of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, the court has repeatedly condoned racial profiling as a law enforcement tool that does not violate the Fourth Amendment. The court tolerates pretextual traffic stops and has sanctioned police reliance on an individual’s “apparent Mexican ancestry” at the border and its ‘functional equivalents’ to be a relevant factor justifying a traffic stop based on reasonable suspicion.”)