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Civil
Rights Activists: Racial Profiling Law Needs Overhaul.
Lawmakers and civil rights
groups called Monday for an overhaul of the state’s racial-profiling law,
following a Courant report showing black and Hispanic motorists pulled over by
police were far more likely to receive a ticket than white drivers stopped for
the same offense.
“This data that the
Hartford Courant revealed only verifies what we know has been going on for
quite some time,” said Imam Mohammad Ansari of the Connecticut chapter of the
NAACP. “We’ve been saying for years that this and other types of racial
profiling are still going on. This is not new.”
But the analysis of traffic stops, coupled with the Department of
Justice’s criminal investigation of alleged discrimination by some officers in
East Haven, has sparked renewed calls to strengthen the state’s law on
profiling. Speakers at a morning press conference at the Legislative Office
Building said the current law has been widely ignored and lacks the teeth to
compel police agencies to investigate and root out possible bias.
The Alvin W. Penn Racial Profiling Prohibition Act was passed in
1999 and required police agencies across the state to collect data on traffic
stops and submit the reports to the state. But only about a third regularly
submit the information, and the Courant’s analysis was the first ever to
compare how whites, blacks and Hispanics fared after police stops for specific
offenses.
“This important bill that was passed is not being enforced,
nobody’s paying any attention to it, and a lot of people are being harmed,”
said state Sen. Edwin Gomes, D-Bridgeport, who holds the seat once held by
Alvin Penn.
Isaias T. Diaz, chairman of the Latino and Puerto Rican Affairs
Commission said he and others would press for legislation that would give the
Office of Policy and Management responsibility for collecting and analyzing
traffic-stop data. That task is currently the responsibility of the
African-American Affairs Commission, which has consistently reported that it
lacks the resources to complete an analysis. Diaz said legislation would also
establish an advisory committee to review compliance with the law.
State Rep. Kelvin Roldán, D-Hartford, went a step further and
said he would support legislation authorizing the appointment of a special master
to supervise departments found to be out of compliance with the law.
The Courant analyzed data on more than 100,000 traffic stops and
found that for 13 categories of offenses – from speeding to running stop signs
to having a broken tail light – Hispanic motorists stopped by police were more
likely to receive a citation than whites stopped for the same offense. Black
motorists were more likely than whites to be cited in 10 of the 13 categories.
Among motorists stopped for running a stop sign, for example, 22 percent of
white motorists received a ticket or summons, compared to 28 percent of black
drivers and 40 percent of Hispanics.
“This is not ‘disparity,’ ” said State Rep. Juan
Candelaria, D-New Haven. “This is purely discrimination.”
Several Connecticut police officials, however, have said they do
not believe officers engage in discriminatory practices and say other factors
may lead to higher ticketing rates for blacks and Hispanics. They point out
that the data collected during traffic stops identifies only the violation that
led to the stop, and say a motorist could be pulled over for a minor violation
but receive a ticket for a more serious offense, such as driving without a
license. That would skew the data if blacks and Hispanics on average are more
likely to be in violation of those more-serious offenses. Others say black and
Hispanic drivers may on average have worse driving histories, which could
affect whether an officer issues a ticket.
Some speakers said the data may under-report the racial and ethnic
disparity in traffic stops. Adam Osmond of Farmington said both he and his wife
have been ticketed by
local police and identified as white, even though they are both dark-skinned
blacks.
“I don’t think anybody in this room could confuse me being white,”
Osmond said. “In my opinion, this was done in order to lower the percentage of
black people [counted as having been ticketed] and increase the percentage of
white people.”
Even before the Courant’s Feb. 26 report, lawmakers were pressing
for legislation that would shift responsibility for analyzing the traffic stop
data from the African-American Affairs Commission to OPM. A similar proposal
failed to come up for a vote last year, but activists Monday said the issue’s
higher profile gives them confidence that lawmakers would approve that change,
and would be open to a broader overhaul of the law as well.
“I’m not just upset about the fact that we have racial profiling
going on, I’m upset about the fact that we’re here this year after attempting
to do a fix to this bill last year,” said state Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield,
D-New Haven, chair of the legislature’s Black and Puerto Rican Caucus. “There
is no one in this building who has any legitimate reason why they would vote
against or work against a bill to fix the bill that passed in 1999.”
http://courantblogs.com/investigative-reporting/civil-rights-activists-racial-profiling-law-needs-overhaul/
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