In 1967, the US Supreme Court ruled in Terry v. Ohio that a "stop-and-frisk" search does not violate the Fourth Amendment if the officer executing the search bears a "reasonable suspicion" that the person being searched has committed or is about to commit a crime. As a result, "stop-and-frisk" searches became much more common during the War on Drugs and were generally conducted in minority communities. "Stop-and-frisk" searches have been criticized for being disproportionately carried out against minorities as a result of racial bias, but empirical literature on that count is inconclusive. Certain authors have found that even after controlling for location and crime participation rates, blacks and Hispanics are stopped more frequently than whites. Others have found that no bias exists on average in an officer's decision to stop a citizen, but bias may exist in an officer's decision to frisk a citizen.
