Anti-Profiling Ordinance Weighed in Hartford

A proposed Hartford ordinance barring racial and ethnic profiling by city police is now before a City Council committee, after leaders of several community organizations converged at City Hall to show their support for the ordinance in mid-November.

Proposed by City Councilman Luis Cotto, the ordinance would limit city police in their immigration enforcement and domestic surveillance activities.

"This ordinance protects the people of Hartford not only by protecting their privacy and their civil rights, but [also] by allowing the Hartford police to become a model nationwide for a department more interested in protecting the safety of residents ... than in feeding information about law abiding residents to the federal government," said Sandra Staub, legal director of the ACLU of Connecticut, who helped draft the ordinance.

"This ordinance will send a clear message ... that the police [are] not to be feared; that they will investigate only criminal behavior and not what people look like or the color of their skin," Mongi Dhaouadi, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Connecticut, told a group of people on the steps of city hall before a public hearing on the proposal.

Others appearing in support of the ordinance included A Better Way Foundation, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, the Clean Slate Committee, the Community Party, the National Lawyers Guild of Hartford and People of Faith of Connecticut.

The ordinance, Cotto says, "would maintain the police department's focus on its core public mission of serving and protecting city residents," while limiting its participation in racial and religious profiling, federal immigration enforcement and undercover infiltration of activist and religious groups.

The proposal was initially raised in August but later withdrawn for procedural reasons. It was again raised at the city council's Nov. 8 meeting and referred to its Quality of Life and Public Safety Committee.