Panel Calls For Police Training To Curtail Racial Profiling

By Adrianna McGinley

A panel of academics and minority rights advocates argued Friday that having police receive behavioral science training to reduce racial profiling will help them gain the trust of at risk communities.

In a hearing with the House Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, David Harris, Law Professor and Associate Dean for Research at the University of Pittsburgh noted that racial profiling breaks down the trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve, which makes policing less effective.

“When people feel targeted, when certain communities feel that they are getting stopped, stopped, and stopped again, all the time, that relationship begins to break down,” Harris said. “People begin to feel that the crime effort is not being done for them but to them, and that has the effect of substituting for trust and for good relationships, fear, and when fear is there, when resentment is there, what happens is communication breaks down, information stops flowing, and you can’t have smart policing unless you’re getting information from the people who are there.”

Witnesses denied claims that minority communities do not welcome law enforcement, but added that police presence needs to be supported by data collection and police must go through behavioral science training in order to curtail racial profiling.

“We do want more police officers, we want them on our streets, we want them visible, but we also want them well trained,” said Hilary Shelton, Senior Vice President for Advocacy and Policy and Director of the NAACP Washington Bureau. “We believe the effectiveness of our police officers is also deeply rooted in the relationship they have with the communities they serve. As long as we allow racial profiling to continue, or the perception of racial profiling as we’re seeing now, without the accountability of measures in which we actually take into account what’s going on in our neighborhoods, we don’t have that trust.”

Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) addressed racial profiling focused on immigrants’ legal status and warned against a wave of civilian profiling.

“Under Alabama HB56, law enforcement is encouraged to profile minorities,” Chu said. “Many Alabama residents are now taking profiling into their own hands and asking minorities for proof of citizenship when they renew their leases, try to open up a utility account, or even go shopping.”

Harris called the new trend “dangerous” because civilians are not trained to take on such policing.

“There’s no training what so ever…the person is not trained to recognize any documents, is not trained what to do if something is discovered, it seems to me like the worst of all possible worlds,” Harris said. “The problem with laws like Alabama and the Arizona law…is that there is nothing they can do to see immigration status. They must fall back on appearance and accent, and that just leads them into profiling. I would not want to be a police officer in those places.”