Last year the murder of George Floyd brought about a wave of protests after his untimely death. A situation escalated from Mr. Floyd using a counterfeit $20 bill, to his eventual death by a police officer through suffocation. Mr. Floyd pleaded for his life, telling the police officers he couldn’t breath. This situation is all to common for People of Color in America. From the info-graphic above, we can see that although black individuals only have a 22% contraband hit rate, in comparison to 34% in white individuals, black individuals are searched for contraband nearly twice as often, and also arrested nearly twice as often. (Missouri Attorney General, 2013) These statistics are not unique to just Missouri.
In New York City, a study conducted by John Jay College of Criminal Justice Found that Latino individuals were nearly twice as likely, and black individuals nearly 3 times as likely as whites to be summoned into court or to be arrested for a misdemeanor offense. This goes to show that these issues are just local to one area of America, but rather widespread in their affect indicative of a systemic issue. 
A study from the Bureau of Justice Statistics data from 1980 to 2008 showed that all across America white on white homicides are roughly intertwined with the amount of black on black homicides. Similarly black on white and white on black homicides are quite close in figure as well. So on top black individuals being found to commit crimes as often, rates of violence are roughly the same between races. So why would the police continue to prey on these minority groups, despite lack of evidence that they are committing crimes more often? The answer to this question is a history of racial disparity in America. Dating back to the Martin Luther King days, black individuals have been mistreated by a systematically oppressive police force. While the brutality of those incidents in the Martin Luther King era was much more frequent, the culture against black individuals and people of color has continued in the police force. Going past the police force, the injustice only gets worse. Once accused of a crime, black individuals are much more likely to serve time or be charged for a crime than white individuals. This arises a double jeopardy of sorts, because not only are these individuals more likely to be accused of a crime, they are also more likely to not get a fair trial. This leaves people of color at great risk to fall victim to the criminal justice system as a whole.
Black lives matter: Eliminating racial inequity in the … (n.d.). Retrieved November 7, 2021, from https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/black-lives-matter-eliminating-racial-inequity-in-the-criminal-justice-system/.