Thursday, September 10, 2015

Maryland Restricts Racial Profiling in New Guidelines for Law Enforcement

OFF THE WIRE

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.
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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.”