Bills
| 3.23.22

Crime not Skin: Ending Racial Profiling (S. 1056)

Do you support or oppose this bill?

What is S. 1056?

(Updated April 18, 2021)

This bill aims to put an end to all practices of racial profiling by law enforcement officials and agencies across the country. It would grant victims of racial profiling the right to have their concerns taken up in court by declaratory or injunctive relief.

Racial profiling, as defined by the U.S. Department of Justice, is:

"Any police-initiated action that relies on the race, ethnicity, or national origin rather than the behavior of an individual or information that leads the police to a particular individual who has been identified as being, or having been, engaged in criminal activity."

The bill would require local and state law enforcement agencies to prove that they have adequate policies and practices for eliminating racial profiling in place. It would also require that those same law enforcement agencies remove any and all encouragement of racial profiling from their policies.  This bill specifically targets  law enforcement agencies that apply for grants from the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program and the Cops on the Beat Program.

Lastly, this bill directs the U.S. Attorney General to set some ground rules for the collection of data on racial profiling — then award grants to fund these efforts.

Argument in favor

Would mandate that law enforcement officers end the practice of detaining or stopping individuals based on their race instead of their behavior.

Argument opposed

Creates vague and burdensome regulations that would be impossible to identify, implement, or enforce at the federal level.

Impact

People of color, law enforcement officers and agencies, and the Attorney General.

Cost of S. 1056

A CBO cost estimate is unavailable.

Additional Info

In Depth: This bill has been introduced before, and failed to see a vote. It is almost identical to its previous versions — but this bill has revised language to include under "racial profiling" the newly protected categories of gender, national origin, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity. 

One of the most highly cited forms of racial profiling is New York City's "stop and frisk" policy — a practice used by the NYC Police Department where officers would stop, question, and frisk, thousands of pedestrians every year, looking for weapons and other contraband. In 2011, NYC officers applied this policy to people in NYC 685,724 times. Eighty-seven percent of those searches involved people of color. And by the NYPD's own records: 
"nearly nine out of 10 stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers have been completely innocent."
It's not just New York — studies conducted by the National Institute of Justice have revealed that people of color across the country are stopped by police officers more frequently than white motorists at traffic stops. Among people of color, racial profiling is considered widespread: 70 percent of African Americans say members of their race were treated less fairly than whites in typical interactions with police. 

Racial profiling and it's existence have been challenged by many critics as being a consequence of effective policing. As Heather Mac Donald, author of “The Myth of Racial Profiling” noted on a PBS segment:
"Police go where the crime is. The policing revolution of the ‘90s was to make policing data driven. The police aren’t looking for white or black, they’re looking for criminals and they go to the neighborhoods with the highest rates of crime, those tend to be minority neighborhoods. At that point, race is irrelevant."