BALTIMORE — Eight months after the Justice Department announced new curbs
on racial profiling, Maryland became on Tuesday the first state to
follow suit, with guidelines aimed at severely restricting law
enforcement officers from singling out suspects based on traits
including race, ethnicity and sexual orientation.
Attorney
General Brian E. Frosh of Maryland issued the rules in a nine-page
memorandum in which he condemned profiling of racial minorities by the
police, calling it a “deeply unfair” practice.
“Racial
profiling continues despite the fact that it is against the law of the
United States; it’s against Maryland law,” Mr. Frosh said in a telephone
interview shortly after announcing the guidelines at a news conference
in the state capital, Annapolis. “We need people to understand that
racial profiling is illegal, and it’s bad police work.”
Maryland
law requires law enforcement agencies to have policies prohibiting
racial and ethnic profiling during traffic stops; the new guidelines
expand on that in two ways, Mr. Frosh’s office said. Under the law,
officers may not use race and ethnicity in making police decisions; the
guidelines also include national origin, identity, disability and
religion as traits that may not be considered. They apply to routine
operations, to investigations and to traffic stops.
Law
enforcement officers may not consider personal characteristics while
“conducting routine police activity,” the memorandum says. They may do
so only if they have “credible information” that such characteristics
are “directly relevant” to the investigation of a crime.
The
new rules, which Mr. Frosh said were inspired by those issued in
December by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. shortly before he
stepped down, come amid a national debate over police treatment of black
men and women in cities like Ferguson, Mo., and here in Baltimore,
where the death of Freddie Gray from injuries sustained in police
custody set off unrest in April.
Maryland
is one of 30 states that have some type of law banning or limiting
racial profiling, according to a report issued last year by the
N.A.A.C.P. Seventeen states ban “pretextual” traffic stops, in which
officers use minor violations as a pretense to search for other illegal
activity, a practice experts say often involves racial profiling; 18
require data collection for all stops and searches; and 18 require the
creation of commissions to review and respond to complaints of racial
profiling.
But
in practice, such laws are often not enforced, said Delores
Jones-Brown, a former New Jersey prosecutor and founder of the Center on
Race, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New
York. She said she hoped other state attorneys general would follow Mr.
Frosh’s lead.
“I
think it’s the kind of thing that needs to happen on a state-by-state
basis, because it at least creates the assumption, the impetus, for
officers to start thinking differently about what they have been doing,”
she said.
In
Baltimore, where fractured relations between the police and the public
long predate the death of Mr. Gray, civil rights advocates welcomed Mr.
Frosh’s move. Toni Holness, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties
Union of Maryland, called it “relevant to the broader movement for
police accountability,” and praised Mr. Frosh for seeking uniformity in
the way police departments across the state applied the law.
“The protections that you have should not vary from county to county,” Ms. Holness said.
Reaction
among law enforcement officials was mixed. Baltimore’s interim police
commissioner, Kevin Davis, who took over the department after the mayor
fired his predecessor this summer, called the standards “an important
step forward” and said they were “ones that all law enforcement should
follow.”
But
the executive director of the Maryland Chiefs of Police Association,
Larry Harmel, said his group was withholding judgment until it reviewed
the memorandum. He suggested in an interview that Mr. Frosh’s move was
mostly symbolic.
“We
don’t tolerate racial profiling,” Mr. Harmel said, noting that many
police agencies in Maryland had their own policies. “It’s been out there
for years that police are not allowed to do that, and there’s a federal
law against it, so for him to come out and have his own special thing
for Maryland — I guess it is good for him.”
