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Date: April 30, 2024 Tue
Time: 12:20 am
Time: 12:20 am
Results for discrimination in law enforcement
2 results foundAuthor: Totman, Molly Title: Searching for Consent: An Analysis of Racial Profiling Data in Texas Summary: The Texas Legislature in 2001 required law enforcement agencies to annually report detailed statistics concerning the race of individuals stopped and searched in their jurisdictions. However, the law did not create a statewide repository for the reports or provide any mechanism for analyzing the data on a statewide level. The Campaign to End Racial Profiling at the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition (TCJC) fills that role. This is the third year that TCJC – in conjunction with allies from the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas (ACLU of Texas), Texas State Conference of branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Texas NAACP), and League of United Latin American Citizens of Texas (Texas LULAC) – have conducted annual studies of statewide racial profiling data. Previously, we have released reports detailing racial disparities in stop and search rates by Texas law enforcement agencies. Specifically, we have analyzed how much more likely Blacks and Latinos are to be stopped or searched than Anglos. In this study, we have chosen to concentrate on consent search data only, thereby eliminating from the analysis searches outside of an officer’s discretion. We are focusing only on situations in which the officer opted to conduct a search of his or her own volition rather than situations in which the officer was duty-bound to do so (e.g., in instances of probable cause or cases where the individual was arrested or had an outstanding warrant). We are also providing local governments and the Texas Legislature with more insight into the extent and ramifications of consent searches. At the conclusion of the 2005 Texas Legislative Session, Governor Rick Perry vetoed Senate Bill 1195, which would have required police officers to obtain a driver’s written or recorded consent before conducting a consent search of a vehicle. Governor Perry wrote in his veto message that “there is insufficient information available at this time to determine whether signed or taped consent requirements place too onerous a burden on law enforcement or provide additional protections to the public. I would expect members of the legislature to review this issue during the interim and to bring back their findings to the 80th legislative session.” Our analysis reveals that consent search practices vary widely by department. Some departments continue to search minorities at higher rates than Anglos; some departments search all races much more often than other agencies. These are significant conclusions in light of previous research finding consent searches to be an inefficient police practice, rarely resulting in findings of wrongdoing, and merely redirecting officers’ energy away from preventing crimes. To begin our analysis, we sent open records requests to 233 departments that issued 3,000 or more citations in 2003. We received 229 timely responses with usable data provided by 201 departments. These departments represent the largest citation-issuing law enforcement agencies in Texas and account for over 4.5 million traffic stops. We analyzed each contributing department’s self-reported statistics as well as the quality of the reports produced in order to better inform policy leaders, law enforcement agencies, and community members as they address the problem and perception of racial profiling, along with localized, general searching practices and policies. Details: Austin, TX: Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, 2006. 32p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed April 14, 2011 at: http://www.criminaljusticecoalition.org/files/userfiles/publicsafety/Racial_Profiling_Data_2006_Analysis_of_Search_and_Consent_Policies_in_Texas.pdf Year: 2006 Country: United States URL: http://www.criminaljusticecoalition.org/files/userfiles/publicsafety/Racial_Profiling_Data_2006_Analysis_of_Search_and_Consent_Policies_in_Texas.pdf Shelf Number: 121343 Keywords: Discrimination in Law EnforcementPolice AttitudesRace and CrimeRacial Profiling in Law Enforcement (Texas)Searches and Seizures |
Author: Harcourt, Bernard E. Title: Henry Louis Gates and Racial Profiling: What's the Problem? Summary: A string of recent studies has documented significant racial disparities in police stops, searches, and arrests across the country. The issue of racial profiling, however, did not receive national attention until the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., at his home in Cambridge. This raises three questions: First, did Sergeant Crowley engage in racial profiling when he arrested Professor Gates? Second, why does it take the wrongful arrest of a respected member of an elite community to focus the attention of the country? Third, why is racial profiling so pervasive in American policing? The answers to these questions are interconnected: they turn on the fact that racial profiling is just another form of statistical discrimination and that, today, we all embrace statistical discrimination as efficient and justified whenever there are group-based differences in behavior or fact disparities. We have all become, today, statistical discriminators. This answer, though, points to a solution in the racial profiling quandary, because statistical discrimination is misguided in dynamic situations where there are feedback effects. In policing, it is counter-productive to the law enforcement objective of reducing crime. Like Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres’s metaphor of the miner’s canary, the racial dimension of racial profiling is what troubles us in the arrest of Henry Louis Gates. But, just like the canary whose distress is a warning that the air in the mine is poisoned, the troubling aspect of race in the debate over racial profiling points to the larger problems of statistical discrimination writ large. Details: Chicago: Law School, University of Chicago, 2009. 31p. Source: Internet Resource: Paper Presented at the Malcolm Wiener Inequality & Social Policy Program, Harvard University, U of Chicago, Law & Economics, Olin Working Paper No. 482, U of Chicago, Public Law Working Paper No. 277: Accessed November 1, 2011 at: http://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/file/482-277-bh-Gates.pdf Year: 2009 Country: United States URL: http://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/file/482-277-bh-Gates.pdf Shelf Number: 123211 Keywords: Discrimination in Law EnforcementRacial ProfilingRacial Profiling in Law Enforcement |