Police Abusing Power

The link below is a article about a 17 year old boy who was harassed by police officers
http://topinfopost.com/2013/07/21/the-17-year-old-who-blew-the-lid-off-racial-profiling-with-his-ipod

For those of you who have not seen this video before the story it is about police harassment in New York.
Alvin, a seventeen year old from Harlem, NYC was walking home from his girlfriends house when he noticed a police car following him. A few blocks further the car turned around and stopped beside Alvin. In this time he quickly turned to the recording app on his phone and recorded everything that happened. Two police officers get out of the car and start to ask him questions. They say that he looks suspicious when he clearly was not doing anything wrong. Alvin questions why they would suspect him of doing anything and he is told to shut up multiple times. He is then searched when the two officers have no authority to do so. While being patted down and searched aggressively he is told he is being a a mutt and asked if he wanted to go to jail. The way Alvin was treated in this video is a clear example of police harassment and should not be tolerated.

The rest of the video is of people telling their stories of police harassment, including police officers themselves. These officers talk about what went on in their daily shifts and how they experienced what Alvin went through. Apparently officers with low numbers of stops, summonses and arrests are subject to disciplinary action. What a police officer does is compared to other officers. This puts pressure on young cops to do things like we have seen in this video, just to look goon in the police force.

The video states that in the last decade 87 percent of people stopped were black or Latino and roughly 9 out of 10 were innocent. These statistics prove that racial profiling has a influence on who is being stopped. Police officers are there to protect us, however many people fear them because of incidents like these. What happened to Alvin was not right and it should not be happening to anyone. Someone needs to put a stop to this and make a change.