It implies that a motorist may be stopped by a police officer largely because of racial bias rather than any apparent violation of traffic law.
[1] The term rose to prominence during the 1990s, when it was brought to public knowledge that American police officers were intentionally targeting racial minorities to curb the trafficking of drugs.
[11] The phrase DWB was amplified through social media by which African Americans can record police encounters and disseminate them to a large audience.
[19] An ACLU analysis of the 2013 Illinois traffic stop report found that African Americans and Latinos are "twice as likely" to be pulled over by police even though whites were more likely to have been discovered with contraband in their car.
As a result, thousands of documents were released to the public, displaying ample evidence that police were instructed to use race-based tactics to identify and stop possible drug couriers on the highway.
In 2016, Jefferson County Circuit Judge Brian Edwards threw out evidence obtained in a traffic stop saying he is "well aware of the troubling levels of gun and drug-related violence in west Louisville."
"[25] In 2019, Tae-Ahn Lea sued LMPD claiming that his civil rights were violated when he was pulled over, searched and handcuffed by officers, after he allegedly made a wide turn.
The posts came just a year after racial profiling in the U.S. had become a salient topic in the public following the killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown by police.
"[30] In 2016, tennis player Serena Williams made a public Facebook post in which she spoke about the fears she had for her nephew after he had driven her to her matches.
The New York Times documented her post in an article titled "'I Won't Be Silent': Serena Williams on the Fear of Driving While Black".
[32] Other prominent African Americans who have recounted their personal experiences of racial profiling include but are not limited to Barack Obama, Johnnie Cochran, Will Smith, Gary Sheffield, and Eric Holder.
In this example, a police officer tries to explain a fear of blacks: Breaion King, an African-American elementary school teacher, was stopped for speeding in June 2015 in Austin, Texas.
Spradlin's answer was because of "violent tendencies" adding "I don't blame" white people for being afraid of blacks "because of their appearance and whatnot, some of them are very intimidating".
The Seton Hall group concluded the police were effectively raising revenue for the municipality from people living in or driving through the "high-crime" area.
[37][38] Police-Public Contact Surveys by the US Bureau of Justice Statistics found that white, black, and Hispanic drivers were stopped by police at similar rates in 2002, 2005, and 2008.
The bias, however, was significant for stops over minor issues such as a broken tail light, a missing front plate or a failure to signal a lane change.
The pretext for the fatal stop was a broken tail light, but the real reason was that the police officer thought Castile resembled a robbery suspect.
[40] The Supreme Court ruled in Whren v. United States (1996) that any minor traffic violation is a legitimate justification for a stop, even if the real reason is some other crime-fighting objective.
[40] According to an October 2015 article in The New York Times, many police departments use traffic stops as a tool to make contact with the community often in higher crime areas where more African-Americans live.
Ronald L. Davis, of the Justice Department's Office of Community Oriented Policing Services said: "There is no evidence that just increasing stops reduces crime.
[44] Actor Danny Glover held a press conference in 1999 because cab drivers in New York City were not stopping for him; this was called "hailing while black".
[45] A pain specialist who treats sickle-cell disease patients at Manhattan's Beth Israel Medical Center reported that for many years doctors forced African American sickle-cell sufferers to endure pain because they assumed that blacks would become addicted to medication; Time magazine labeled this "ailing while black".
In separate incidents, Ferrell and McBride, both African-American, were shot and killed after they experienced a motor vehicle accident and went to the nearby home of a white stranger to ask for help.
[51] In August 2018, 61-year-old Marine veteran Karle Robinson was detained at gunpoint by Kansas police for carrying his television into the house he had bought and was moving into.
"[54] Also in November 2018, good samaritan Emantic Bradford Jr. was shot three times and killed by Alabama police while he was attempting to stop a different active shooter.
"[57][58] In May 2020, The Nation coined the analogous phrase "birding while black" in reference to an incident involving African-American birdwatcher Christian Cooper at the Ramble in New York City's Central Park.
[77] Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, and Anthony Morgan, a civil rights lawyer, said that in the 1980s and 1990s the RCMP introduced Operation Pipeline, a drug interdiction strategy used in the United States.
[80] In July 2021, two RCMP officers in Nova Scotia stopped a car containing a black couple, and ordered the male driver at gunpoint to exit the vehicle with arms raised.
[80] In July 2020, the British athlete Bianca Williams and the Portuguese sprinter Ricardo dos Santos were stopped and searched while driving in London by Metropolitan Police officers on suspicion of possession of drugs and weapons.