Committee Hears Testimony on Failure of Racial Profiling Ban

Racial profiling is illegal in Connecticut but the state has never made a serious or consistent effort to comply with a law to collect data about it, Sandra Staub, legal director of the ACLU of Connecticut, told a civil rights panel on Tuesday.

"Here in Connecticut we don't have the data," she testified at a hearing of the Connecticut Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. "We don't have any way to meaningfully assess what is happening out there."

The Alvin Penn Racial Profiling Prohibition Act, passed by the state legislature in 1999 after an incident of racial profiling against state Sen. Alvin Penn, prohibits police from stopping, detaining or arresting anyone solely on the basis of race. It also requires police departments to adopt policies prohibiting racial profiling and to collect data on traffic stops and enforcement actions, including the race of the driver or suspect.

That hasn't happened, Staub said. "It never worked."

The ACLU-CT discovered in a series of Freedom of Information requests and other investigations that no reporting form has ever been distributed and that many police departments never complied with the collection requirement, she said. Although the law requires an annual report based on the data, the office of the Chief State's Attorney produced only one, in 2001. That responsibility was passed in 2003 to the African-American Affairs Commission, which doesn't have the resources to carry it out, Staub said.

As a result, the only information available about racial profiling comes from anecdotes like the one that State Rep. Toni Walker told a legislative committee in April about being pulled over in New Haven, Staub said. Walker said she was driving some elderly constituents home and was stopped by a police officer who wanted to know what she was doing in the neighborhood.

"I think the state of Connecticut needs to ask when Rep. Walker tells this story in 2011 why we have nothing to show for the work that was done on the Penn Act," Staub said.

"We have all these anecdotes and we have no data," she said.

Other states have done a better job of data collection, Staub said, including Rhode Island, which has based much of its efforts against racial profiling on the work of Jack McDevitt, director of the Institute on Race and Justice at Northeastern University. McDevitt also spoke to the committee at Tuesday's hearing at the Legislative Office Building, and emphasized that collecting data is a critical first step in addressing the problem.

The committee will collect written comments from the public until Jan. 6, 2012, and issue recommendations afterward to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Comments may be mailed to the Eastern Regional Office, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 624 9th Street NW., Suite 740, Washington, DC 20425, faxed to (202) 376-7548, or emailed to ero@usccr.gov.