Violation
At this point in the poem, I am recounting personal experiences where I have been racially profiled by the police, and even been subject to stop and frisk procedures. I have been harassed by officers who approached me with the sole intention of trying to induce a verbal altercation through demeaning remarks. I have been stopped in bus and train stations on my way home from school and/or work, when I would be doing nothing more than listening to my iPod waiting for public transportation, and have been searched without any reasonable suspicion of a crime. This has happened to me a number of times, and is what I am initially referencing in the poem. The second scenario that I described was as instance where I was in my car with two of my cousins of similar ages to myself. After pulling up to where we needed to be, we waited for less than a minute while a car pulled out of a spot on the street, and then I immediately parallel parked in the same spot. As soon as I was parked, I looked up and made eye contact with several officers in a squad car driving in the opposite direction from us. After making eye contact with them, I watched as they proceeded to make a U-Turn and pull up in front of my car. After pretending to check out a motorcycle parked a few feet away for about 10 seconds, the officers then approached my vehicle. Upon asking what the problem was, the officer told me that I had been "double parked" as his pretense for "reasonable suspicion of a crime", one that I knew was undoubtedly construed solely as an excuse to approach us. He asked my for my license and registration, and even after the search came up clean, the officers told my cousins and I to step out of the car. They began to not only frisk us for weapons and contraband, but also proceeded to search my car as well. Though I knew this was in direct violation of my constitutional rights, I did not say anything to the officers out of not wanting to escalate the situation any further. After they were unable to find anything problematic, the officers angrily grumbled to each other and quickly got back in their car and drove off. This is something that is all too common, as thousands of innocent minority men and women are approached simply because of the color of their skin. So often do we have our rights as American citizens violated, and we do nothing to defend ourselves out of fear of making our situation worse. If you speak up for yourself, you put yourself at risk for potentially being arrested on false charges such as disorderly conduct or resisting arrest.