Posts tagged racial profiling
Recording racial profiling
Apr 20th
In somewhat of a banner day at the CT Senate (this is turning out to be quite the legislative session), two bills passed that chamber of the legislature and move to the House for its approval. Both bills have to do with police behavior, both having been in the spotlight recently.
The first is a bill that not only makes it clear that it is legal for citizens to record police officers, but also provides a cause of action for a lawsuit against officers who illegally prevent citizens from conducting such video recording:
(b) A peace officer who interferes with any person taking a photographic or digital still or video image of such peace officer or another peace officer acting in the performance of such peace officer’s duties shall, subject to sections 5-141d, 7-465 and 29-8a of the general statutes, be liable to such person in an action at law, suit in equity or other proper proceeding for redress.
There are some exceptions, however, to civil liability:
(c) A peace officer shall not be liable under subsection (b) of this section if the peace officer had reasonable grounds to believe that the peace officer was interfering with the taking of such image in order to (1) lawfully enforce a criminal law of this state or a municipal ordinance, (2) protect the public safety, (3) preserve the integrity of a crime scene or criminal investigation, (4) safeguard the privacy interests of any person, including a victim of a crime, or (5) lawfully enforce court rules and policies of the Judicial Branch with respect to taking a photograph, videotaping or otherwise recording an image in facilities of the Judicial Branch.
Some of which seem to be somewhat vague in their definition and might lend themselves to overbroad application. But hopefully this codification will prevent what happened to Luis Luna from happening again. For more on the debate on this bill, see this Capitol Watch post.
Second, there was the bill to strengthen the racial profiling law in CT, in the wake of the East Haven fiasco. The bill would require:
1) A standardized form, in both printed and electronic format, to be used by police officers of municipal police departments and the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection to record traffic stop information. The form shall allow the following information to be recorded: (A) Date and time of stop; (B) location of the stop; (C) name and badge number of the police officer making the stop; (D) race, color, ethnicity, age and gender of the operator of the motor vehicle that is stopped, provided the identification of such characteristics shall be based on the observation and perception of the police officer responsible for reporting the stop; (E) nature of the alleged traffic violation or other violation that caused the stop to be made and the statutory citation for such violation; (F) the disposition of the stop including whether a warning, citation or summons was issued, whether a search was conducted and whether a custodial arrest was made; and (G) any other information deemed appropriate. The form shall also include a notice that if the person stopped believes they have been stopped, detained or searched solely because of their race, color, ethnicity, age, gender or sexual orientation, they may file a complaint with the appropriate law enforcement agency, and instructions on how to file such complaint;
The CT Mirror reports on the basics of this bill:
The anti-profiling bill sets standards for reporting the information and shifts responsibility for its analysis from the Commission on African-American Affairs to the Office of Policy and Management, which has staff and resources unavailable to the commission. The new legislation also allows OPM to withhold public safety-related state funds from communities that don’t comply.
Though most GOP senators backed the anti-profiling bill, Canton Republican Kevin Witkos, a 28-year veteran of that community’s police force, argued that while profiling is wrong, the measure was flawed. Rather than requiring officers to guess at a motor vehicle operator’s race and ethnicity, Witkos said the legislature should mandate that drivers provide this information on their driver’s license.
But [Judiciary Committee Co-Chair Sen.] Coleman argued this would work against efforts to end profiling, adding that it’s crucial to know what an officer’s beliefs about an operator were when the decision to stop the motorist was made. Witkos also tried, unsuccessfully, to amend the bill to ensure that state funds couldn’t be stripped from community policing or youth athletic programs tied to municipal departments found not in compliance with profiling reporting rules. “It’s not fair to the other areas of the police department that do good work,” he said.
All in all, a good start.
DOJ finds widespread racial profiling in East Haven
Dec 31st
the land of steady racism
Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote about the town of East Haven, CT hurtling towards “sundown town” status, caused largely by alleged institutional racism and bias towards minorities – lately specifically Latinos. In that post, I mentioned that there was a federal civil rights lawsuit pending and that the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice had opened an investigation into these alleged discriminatory practices of the East Haven Police Department. This past week, the DOJ issued its report in the form of a letter [PDF] sent to the East Haven mayor and boy is it damning (media coverage here).
Some of its key findings:
- The East Haven Police Department (EHPD) conducted disproportionate traffic stops of Latinos. Latinos accounted for 24.8% of the stops in the 4pm-12am shift, which is typically the busiest. The numbers for the other shifts were 17.8% and 14.7%.
- However, comparing the percentage of Latinos stopped to the percentage of Latinos in the population reveals a starker difference. Latinos accounted for 19.9% of all traffic stops, but make up only 8.3% of East Haven drivers (and 15.5% of East Haven and surrounding towns).
In making these stops, the DOJ found that the EHPD targets Latino drivers and employs tactics not used against non-Latinos:
- Officers heavily patrol known Latino areas, lying in wait for people leaving predominantly Latino-oriented businesses.
- Other methods use include following cars until a traffic violation occurs, out-of-state license plates known to be “forged”, citing speeding but writing little to no information about the speeding on the ticket itself.
- Latinos face harsher treatment after being stopped: they are more likely to be arrested and have their cars towed for traffic violations than non-Latinos.
The DOJ further charges that the EHPD haphazardly employes immigration policies against Latino drivers and points out that the EHPD and East Haven have had a long standing problem with policing of minorities, citing a recently concluded federal lawsuit which alleged discrimination against African Americans (Jones v. Town of East Haven, et. al.).
The most shocking thing about all of this (or the least surprising, depending on how naive you are) is that the DOJ got all the above information from the EHPD itself: from 2 years’ worth of police reports and interviews with officers and community members.
The institutional coddling of these discriminatory practices is mind-blowing. From the news report:
East Haven may be unique, if only because of a tangle of politics and the close friendship between East Haven’s Republican mayor, Joseph Maturo Jr. and his chief of police, Leonard Gallo.
Maturo was originally mayor from 1997 to 2007 and he hired Gallo as chief in 1998. But Gallo was put on administrative leave by Maturo’s Democratic successor as mayor, April Capone, in 2010, a result of the allegations of racial profiling and excessive use of force by East Haven Police.
After Maturo won in the November elections, he almost immediately returned Gallo to full duty as chief — an astounding move given the ongoing civil rights and grand jury investigations into police actions during Gallo’s tenure.
And more:
The 23-page report released Monday by the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division cited top police officers for “creating and condoning a hostile and intimidating environment for anyone seeking to provide relevant information in this investigation.”
“We also learned that Chief Gallo had warned staff that the Department of Justice had agreed to provide him with the names of individuals who cooperated with the investigation,” according to the civil rights report. And that, federal officials insisted, was completely and utterly untrue.
How bizarre is this institutional protection? EHPD officers told DOJ officials (that’s the fucking Federal Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, in case we were unclear) that the DOJ officials’ safety could not be guaranteed by the EHPD when they went on ride-alongs. Ponder that for a second.
The DOJ found an abject lack of any internal policing mechanisms and that the EHPD hadn’t ever bothered to compile the statistics to see if racial profiling existed with its department, something that’s required by C.G.S. 54-1m. In addition, the DOJ noted that a large number of entries into the EHPD’s database seemed to be missing ethnicity data or the data seemed to be misreported.
EHPD is at a crossroads: either admit that there are problems and work toward fixing them or deny it all and face lengthy and costly lawsuits brought not only by civilians, but also the Department of Justice. As a new year dawns, one can only hope that concern for the safety of officers and the constitutional rights of its residents rises above deep-seated racism and pride.
Sundown comes to East Haven
Dec 27th
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East Haven, CT generally has two claims to fame: being a predominantly Italian-American populated town and being in the middle of the collision of tectonic plates during the Paleozoic Era, which led to the formation of Pangaea (yeah, bet you didn’t know that!). And now, rapidly, the town is intent on adding a third selling point: a sundown town.
Residents of Connecticut will have heard these stories for years now: the systematic harassment of and discrimination against minorities, mainly Hispanic, who comprise about 5% of the town’s population. For example, Father James Manship was arrested in March of 2009 after he started videotaping the harassment of Latinos [what is up with cops and videotaping in the Havens?]. During that same incident, police inexplicably ordered the owner of a store to take down expired license plates that adorned his walls:
On the evening of his arrest, at around 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 19, Father Manship walked into My Country Store, a convenience store in East Haven run by Ecuadorians. Inside, the police were removing over 60 expired license plates that had been hung as decorations in the store. The license plates were government property, the officers had said, and they were confiscating them.
After the police arrested the priest, they noticed that the store was equipped with security cameras. Elio Cruz, a leader in New Haven’s Virgen Del Cisne Ecuadorian community, was in the store that night. “When [the police officers] realized there was videotaping from My Country Store, they went crazy,” Cruz recalled later. “They said it was illegal and they tried to grab the computer.”
Matute said that three officers entered the back room without his permission and searched the shelves in his storeroom. When they found the hard drive containing the store’s digital security camera footage, they wanted to take it, but Matute wouldn’t let them, he said. Matute said that the officers then called a detective to bring a video camera to record the security footage off of the computer screen, but the detective’s camera didn’t work.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. In October of this year, some Latino residents of East Haven filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city, after the DOJ had opened an investigation into police tactics:
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