The “Racial and Identity Profiling Act of 2015” was signed into law by California Governor Jerry Brown on Saturday. The new law is a step toward combating the nationwide issue of racial bias in law enforcement.
The new law forces police and law enforcement to record demographic data from each stop and make the information public. The information they need to collect includes: time, date, location of the stop, search, seizure, the characteristics of each officer involved in the stop, a description of all persons detained during the stop, language barriers, and the perceived or voluntarily disclosed race, gender, sexual orientation, and/or religion of the person.
Members of Black Lives Matter and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) gathered for the signing of the bill, shouting “This is what democracy looks like,” “Justice, if we don’t get it, shut it down,” “Fight back,” and “Black lives matter,” according to Breitbart News.
Law enforcement officials condemned the act stating that it will add more documentation and paperwork, keeping them from being out in the community.
“It’s a terrible piece of legislation,” said Lt. Steve James, president of the Long Beach Police Officers Assn. and the national trustee for the California Fraternal Order of Police. “We have contact with the public all the time that requires no documentation, no paperwork,” he said. “Now, the amount of time we have to spend doing documentation and paperwork has gone up. The time doing menial tasks has gone up.”
Lt. James added: “There is no racial profiling. There just isn’t,” he said. “There is criminal profiling that exists.”
Lt. Craig Lally, president of the union that represents Los Angeles police officers, called the new law “another one of these feel-good laws” that will be impossible to enforce.
“Sometimes when people get pulled over they claim it’s because they are black, or Hispanic or white,” he said. “Unless you can get into the officer’s mind when he’s doing that traffic stop, there is no way to prove it was because of race — unless he or she admits it…. It is impossible to look at statistics and prove racism.”
Supporters of the bill celebrated the move by California legislation. Studies have shown in the past unarmed black men are more likely to die by police gunfire than unarmed white men.
Rosa Aqeel, the legislative director of PICO California, a faith-based advocacy group that lobbied heavily for the law’s passage, stated the new law would allow officials to quantify data in order to see if racial profiling is happening within law enforcement agencies.
“It creates a set of actual data that will allow us to see where racial profiling is happening,” Aqeel said, describing police officials who deny that racial profiling occurs as out of touch with reality.
“All I can say: Thank God this bill got signed and we’ll be able to look at the data and see what’s really going on,” she said. “We should all want to see the data so we can see how pervasive the problem is.”
“This will provide additional data,” Melina Abdullah, a professor of Pan-African studies at Cal State L.A., said of the new law. “If I were law enforcement I’d think of it as an opportunity to demonstrate that I wasn’t racially profiling, that we have a fair and equitable system. The resistance to it signals to me and many others that there is a lot of racial profiling going on.”
The new racial profiling law was one of 13 criminal justice bills that the governor signed over the weekend. Other legislation now requires police officers who wear cameras to follow specific rules on the storage and usage of their videos so it is not mishandled. Another law now requires police agencies to issue annual detailed reports on all cases in which officers used force that results in death or serious injury of the perpetrator.
