Racial Profiling | featured news

Every job candidate lives in fear that a Google search could reveal incriminating indiscretions from a distant past. But a new study examining racial bias in the wording of online ads suggests that Google's advertising algorithms may be unfairly associating some individuals with wrongdoing they didn’t commit.

In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques, the New York Police Department's secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation, the department acknowledged in court testimony unsealed late Monday. The Demographics Unit is at the heart of a police spying program, built with help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.

Transportation Security Administration officers at Boston's Logan International Airport are alleging that a program intended to help flag possible terrorists based on passengers' mannerisms has led to rampant racial profiling, a newspaper reported Saturday.

When the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the key provision of Arizona's immigration enforcement law last month, opponents of the measure were encouraged that the court left the door open for future lawsuits once the law goes into effect. But legal experts warn that lawsuits claiming racial profiling by police officers — one of the avenues that Justice Anthony Kennedy listed as a way to challenge the law — take a long time to develop and are difficult to win.

In oral arguments, both liberal and conservative justices indicate they may maintain a provision of the Arizona law that tells police to check the immigration status of people they stop.

A police chief under fire for his handling of anti-Latino abuse allegations that led to the arrests of four officers last week is retiring from office, the mayor said Monday, describing his departure as a "selfless act" intended to help the town heal.

Two days after a Connecticut mayor delivered an errant comment about eating tacos to support East Haven Latinos, some of whom are the alleged victims of police mistreatment, Mayor Joseph Maturo Jr. apparently got his wish.

A Connecticut mayor said “I might have tacos” when asked how he would support the Latino community in the aftermath of the arrest of four town police officers accused of racial profiling.

Mexico on Tuesday asked a federal court in Arizona to declare the state's new immigration law unconstitutional, arguing that the country's own interests and its citizens' rights are at stake.

Arizona lawmakers have approved several changes to the recently passed sweeping law targeting illegal immigration.