The Perversity of Profiling
By Laura W. Murphy, Director, ACLU Washington Legislative Office & Hina Shamsi, Director, ACLU National Security Project at 2:19pm
The Justice Department is considering revised racial profiling guidance that, if issued, could set back race relations and basic fairness in this country. We hope that it does not make that mistake.
The New York Times on Thursday reported that “long-awaited revisions to the Justice Department’s racial profiling rules would allow the F.B.I. to continue many, if not all, of the tactics opposed by civil rights groups, such as mapping ethnic populations and using that data to recruit informants and open investigations.” In light of the Obama administration’s recent and deservedly lauded criminal justice policy reforms, we had expected it would take a far different approach to racial profiling than this. After all, revisions to racial profiling rules that retain loopholes permitting racial, religious, and national origin profiling are not the reforms that Americans need and deserve.
The Justice Department guidance that urgently needs revision was issued in 2003 by Attorney General John Ashcroft. The Ashcroft Guidance bans racial profiling, which it condemns as discriminatory, “not merely wrong, but also ineffective,” and “patently unacceptable.” Despite these strong words, the Ashcroft Guidance contains gaping holes: It does not prohibit profiling based on religion or national origin and permits racial, religious, and ethnic profiling in national security investigations and at the nation’s borders.
The Ashcroft Guidance’s loopholes thus gave federal law enforcement express permission to discriminate against America’s minorities. And wrongful discrimination in the national security and border contexts quickly spread to others. Government records obtained by the ACLU showed the FBI mapped minority communities around the country based on crude and false stereotypes about their propensity to commit crime. The targeted communities include Arab Americans in Michigan, African Americans in Georgia, Chinese and Russian Americans in California, and Latino Americans in multiple states.
Mapping is just one part of the problem.
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https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-criminal-law-reform-racial-justice/perversity-profiling