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By Nusrat Choudhury, Staff Attorney, ACLU's Racial Justice Program The Tampa Bay Times' recent disclosure that police are targeting Blacks who ride bicycles — including children as young as three years old — for dramatically high rates of stops and searches is the latest piece in the nationwide debate about racial profiling that has followed the police-involved deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, and countless others. Communities across the country are connecting the deluge of incidents in which police use force against Blacks (or, as in Gray's case, show gross disregard for Black life) to everyday interactions in which police stop, frisk, and search Blacks and Latinos because of their race, rather than evidence of wrongdoing — a practice well-documented in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Ferguson. The latest reports from Tampa underscore just how little progress has been made in rooting out racial profiling and how the routine over policing of communities of color can lead to interactions that tragically devolve into the use of force.

By Chase Strangio, Staff Attorney, ACLUGetting arrested for using the bathroom could become the law in Florida.Using a public restroom is something most people have done. For many non-transgender people, the experience might be gross or inconvenient, but most people don't have serious concerns about whether they will be harassed, attacked, or arrested when walking into a bathroom. But for most trans people, this is precisely what we think about every time we walk into the bathroom.