Outlaw racial profiling by police

Racial profiling continues to plague our nation despite the constitutional guarantee of equal treatment under the law.

Likewise, excessive force by police persists despite the Constitution’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.

Whatever else we have learned from the recent tragedies of police violence, it is clear that we need a comprehensive national policy that outlaws racial profiling in order to rein in police violence, harassment and other misconduct.

Such profiling undermines public safety by straining police-community trust. When law enforcement officers target community members, or treat them more aggressively, on account of race, they are less effective at fighting crime because they are targeting innocent people instead of criminal suspects.

To root out racial profiling, we need stronger policies at the state and local levels, as well as more effective training and oversight of police officers.

A September 2014 report from the NAACP, titled “Born Suspect,” found 20 out of the 50 states do not have laws that prohibit racial profiling by law enforcement. Only 17 states require data collection on all police stops and searches, and only 15 require analysis and publication of other racial profiling data.

Remedies for racial profiling incidents also vary from state to state.

Back in 2003, the U.S. Department of Justice adopted a policy titled “Guidance Regarding the Use of Race by Federal Law Enforcement Agencies,” which was an important first step in training law enforcement agencies to eliminate illegitimate uses of race in policing.

That policy, however, had significant limitations and had not been updated despite advocacy by civil rights groups.

In 2012, more than 200 civil rights groups asked Attorney General Eric Holder to update the policy to, among other things, prohibit profiling on the basis of national origin, religion, gender and sexual identity.

They also called for elimination of loopholes for national security and border enforcement, the creation of enforceable standards, and for it to apply to all state and local law enforcement agencies that receive federal funds or work with federal agencies. Recently, the attorney general finally proposed new guidelines on racial profiling that ban the practice by federal law enforcement agencies.

This is a good first step, but the updated policy should have included the research-based proposals made by civil rights advocates.

State and local law enforcement agencies should have also been covered in the proposal because Americans encounter local police in far greater numbers than any federal officers.

If we have learned anything from the recent tragic deaths of Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., it is that excessive force and racial profiling are two destructive modes of police misconduct that require concerted, vigilant action to reduce and eliminate.

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Ranjana Natarajan is a clinical professor and director of the Civil Rights Clinic at The University of Texas School of Law.

This story was originally published December 11, 2014 at 5:47 PM with the headline "Outlaw racial profiling by police."