Twenty states don’t have laws to prevent racial-profiling by law enforcement while 30 states have some anti-profiling measures on the books that are insufficient in stopping what’s become a disturbing and widespread practice, according to an NAACP study released Thursday.
‘In 2014 there is not one state that has a statute that can stand up against this pandemic of police misconduct,” NAACP President Cornell Brooks said in discussing the report at the Congressional Black Caucus Legislative Conference in Washington. ‘Racial profiling is a day-to-day reality for communities of color, gays and lesbians, young people all across the length and breadth of this nation.’
The report, titled ‘Born Suspect: Stop-and-Frisk Abuses and the Continued Fight to End Racial Profiling,’ examined laws in all 50 states and found that only 17 states where profiling violations are a crime.
In the wake of civil unrest surrounding the shooting death of an 18-year-old African-American man by police in Ferguson, Mo., the report chronicles state efforts to curb profiling. It lauds Rhode Island and Connecticut for having ‘the most comprehensive’ anti-profiling laws and chastises Kentucky ‘which basically lacks all of the necessary components for a good law.’
The report says the federal government needs to do more beginning with Congress passing the End Racial Profiling Act, a bill first introduced in 2001. The measure would ban profiling, train law enforcement in how to avoid the practice, and collect data on alleged profiling incidents.