During New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s first year in office, the New York Police Department stopped and interrogated 97,296 people on the streets. By 2007, with the Bloomberg administration pushing the a stop-and-frisk strategy, police made more than a half a million stops. Last year, the figure rose to a record 685,724 people. And according to a New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) report, the vast majorities of stops — about 87 percent — were of blacks and Latinos. Despite robust defenses of the tactics, they appear to be less effective than the Bloomberg administration and NYPD claim.

Most troubling, the NYCLU report seemed to bear out charges of racial profiling in stop-and-frisk situations. In precincts where blacks and Latinos are least represented among the population (14 percent or less), blacks and Latinos were nonetheless the target of 70 percent of stops. Perhaps most staggeringly, the the Wall Street Journal highlighted that the number of stops of black men between the ages of 14 and 24 (168,126 ) exceeded the total city population of black men in that age range (158,406).

Along with the wildly disproportionate stops, blacks and Latinos were more likely to get frisked. Yet they yielded a smaller percentage of weapons than whites. The NYCLU produced these charts demonstrating the disparities:

On Bloomberg’s weekly radio show last month, Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly defended the stop-and-frisk strategy, whose increased application they credit with a 50 percent drop in the city’s murder rate, but it’s not at all clear how this strategy produced such an outcome. Comparing 2003 and 2011, stops increased by more than half a million while only 172 more guns were found. That’s a jump of finding one gun for every 266 stops versus one gun per every 3,000 stops.

Protesters in Alabama are entering their second day, and eleventh mile, of a march to demand civil rights for immigrants and people of color. The march is a response to Alabama’s harsh new immigration law, among the toughest in the nation. But it also comes on the heels of the introduction of strict voter identification laws in many states that would make it significantly harder for people of color to vote.

The march follows the route Martin Luther King took during the historic Selma-to-Montgomery marches of the 1960s, and falls on the 47th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” a particularly gruesome day of beatings during those marches.

Among those attending this year’s march are many of the famous civil rights activists of the 1960s, including U.S. Representative John Lewis, Reverend Jesse Jackson, and MSNBC host and former presidential candidate Reverend Al Sharpton.

Organizers have stressed unity for racial justice between these famous African American leaders and the Latinos who face discrimination from these laws. Citing both the immigration and voter ID laws, Sharpton yesterday called the bills the “largest affront to the Voting Rights Act since it was put into law 47 years ago.”

Nicole Cairns, the Online Communications Director for Reform Immigration for America, one of the groups participating in the march, explained to ThinkProgress how immigrants’ rights groups view the connection between the different groups involved in the march:

In Alabama, nearly every basic right is under attack – voting rights, reproductive rights, and now welfare. Alabama also passed the worst anti-immigrant bill into law last year, which legalized racial profiling and told an entire generation of immigrants they’re not wanted in this state. Through these bills, Alabama is attempting to disenfranchise low-income, black, and immigrant residents of the state. We’re marching to let them know we won’t stand for this.

Indeed, a study from the Brennan Center for Justice projects that voter ID laws could make it more difficult for over five million eligible voters to vote. Disproportionately, these voters are Black and Latino.

But these laws are not just an affront to civil rights. The immigration bill is also an affront to Alabama’s economy. As the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Alabama has projected, it could cost the state billions of dollars a year in lost agriculture– not to mention the automobile executives from Honda and Mercedes who have been apprehended under the new law.

The Alabama march will continue over the next week, totaling 50 miles. Protesters will gather at the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church on March 9 for a final rally.

Wisconsin prohibits employers from discriminating “on the basis of age, race, creed, color, disability, marital status, sex, national origin, ancestry, arrest record, conviction record, military service, use or nonuse of lawful products off the employer’s premises during nonworking hours, or declining to attend a meeting or to participate in any communication about religious matters or political matters,” and it ensures that this law has teeth by allowing victims of discrimination to hold their employers accountable in state court. That’s about to change, however, as the Wisconsin legislature recently voted to strip the state’s workers of their ability to actually enforce this law — leaving anti-worker Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) as the only obstacle to the law’s total repeal:

The Equal Pay Enforcement Act was meant to deter employers from discriminating by giving workers more avenues to press charges. Among other provisions, it allows individuals to plead their cases in the less costly, more accessible state circuit court system, rather than just in federal court.

In November, the state Senate approved (SB 202) rolling back this provision. On Wednesday, the Assembly did the same. Both were party-line votes. The legislation is now in the hands of Gov. Scott Walker (R). His office did not return a request for comment on whether the governor would sign it. . . .

Women earn 77 cents for every dollar that men make. In Wisconsin, it’s 75 cents, according to [the Wisconsin Alliance for Women's Health], which also estimates that families in the state “lose more than $4,000 per year due to unequal pay.”

Walker, of course, has no power to repeal federal law, so he cannot strip Wisconsin workers of their right to be free from race, gender and other forms of discrimination that are banned by national civil rights laws. Nevertheless, Wisconsin law provides additional protections, such as safeguards for people with criminal convictions, that are not available under federal law.

Moreover, as Amanda Terkel points out, Wisconsin state courts can enable victims of discrimination to receive swifter justice instead of waiting for an increasingly overburdened federal judiciary to act. And this problem is only likely to get worse as Walker’s political allies in the U.S. Senate wage an unprecedented campaign of obstruction against President Obama’s nominees to the federal bench.

It’s tough to imagine something more fundamental to a just society that a guarantee that employers will not discriminate, which is why it is so baffling why Wisconsin lawmakers do not believe that their state should protect against such discrimination.

In 2004, presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) voted against a resolution praising the 1964 law banning whites-only lunch counters and employment discrimination because he claimed that “the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not improve race relations or enhance freedom. Instead, the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty.” Ron Paul’s views were recently echoed by his son, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who claimed that opposing the ban on whites-only lunch counters is the “hard part about believing in freedom.”

In an interview this morning on CNN, the younger Paul was asked to defend his father’s disregard for one of the most important legislative accomplishments in American history. His answer? Allowing private businesses to maintain a culture of virulent racism is the price we must pay in order to have cigar bars:

RAND PAUL: There are things that people were concerned about that were unintended consequences [of the Civil Rights Act], for example, people who believe very fervently in people having equal protection under the law, and are against segregation and all that, still worried about the loss of property rights…for example, I can’t have a cigar bar any more, and you say, “well, that has nothing to do with race” — the idea of whether or not you control your property, it also tells you, come in here I want to know the calorie count on that, and the calorie Nazis come in here and tell me. [...] The point is that its not all about that. It’s not all about race relations, it’s about controlling property, ultimately.

Watch it:

Later in the same interview, Paul attacks the interviewers for “dwelling on an obscure issue” by questioning his father’s opposition to desegregation. Simply put, there are not very many victims of the apartheid state that the Civil Rights Act helped end who would describe desegregation as an “obscure issue.”

Last week, the Department of Justice released the results of a three-year investigation into the actions of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, finding the Arizona official had committed rampant abuses and regularly “engages in racial profiling.”

In particular, the study found that Arpaio’s office targeted Latinos both in the workplace and in the streets. “Latino drivers are four to nine times more likely to be stopped than similarly situated non-Latino drivers,” read the report, and his office often targeted individuals simply for having “dark skin” or speaking Spanish. In one example, as Ian Millhiser writes, “One inmate was refused new bed sheets, even after she used a fellow inmate to explain in English that her old sheets were soiled, because the jail told the inmate that she had to make the request herself in English.”

Though instances of lawlessness like this have been ubiquitous in Arpaio’s office, conservatives are beginning to rush to the Arizona sheriff’s defense. Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) echoed this sentiment on the radio late last week, telling host G. Gordon Liddy that the investigation was a “waste of taxpayer money.” Poe went on to excuse Arpaio, saying the sheriff was simply “doing his job.”

LIDDY: The attack on the sheriff of Maricopa County, Joe Arpaio, again by the federal government, accusing him of racial profiling, because apparently Hispanics are more likely to be illegal aliens than anybody else. [...]

POE: [...] Sheriff Arpaio and Maricopa County has the authority under a program called the 287-G program, authorized by the federal government, to investigate people in his jail that are illegally in the United States. He’s authorized by the federal government to do this. Now the federal government is saying, “ahh, we don’t want you doing this anymore,” and has named a bunch of excuses. They’ve been investigating him for three years. It’s amazing. Three-year investigation and they’re still not through. Another waste of taxpayer money. Program authorized by the federal government, approved by this sheriff, and now the federal government is saying, “obviously, he’s doing such a good job we don’t want him doing it anymore and want to take away his ability to even inquire as to people in the county jail as to whether they’re illegally in the country or not.”

The Justice Department’s findings against Arpaio are devastating in their scope. In Maricopa County, there are more individuals – over 540,000 – who primarily speak Spanish than in all but six other counties in the nation, yet Arpaio’s office routinely singled out non-English speakers to target. They even once employed a police operation at a local McDonald’s because they received a letter claiming that one of the workers didn’t speak English. Such racially-motivated targeting has been so commonplace under Arpaio that the Justice Department warned they will “not hesitate to file suit, if necessary,” to end such practices.

Unfortunately, Arpaio will likely continue to dismiss these serious charges – he claimed that it was actually he whose civil rights had been violated by the Justice Department by “calling him every kind of name” – under the cover of defenders like Poe.