News
Page 4
Street Roots • July 10-16, 2015
Oregon's new profiling ban
Individual
instances o f
profiling are
difficult to prove,
so the state will
rely on patterns
BY EM ILY GREEN
STAFF W RITER
bill prohibiting
profiling by law
enforcement in
Oregon is on its way to
becoming law after passing
Oregon’s house and senate.
It doesn’t criminalize profiling, as laws
17 other states do, but it does require all law
eruorceinentagen<ie^statew idetoestablish
policies prohibiting officers from profiling. It
also requires each department to Set up a
system for investigating profiling complaints,
which under the bill, can be submitted a
number of different ways, including
anonymously.
While profiling by law enforcement is now
illegal, an individual complaint is unlikely to
lead to any disciplinary action on its own.
Local attorneys say proving a stop was
racially motivated is close to impossible
unless the officer says something
discriminatory in front of witnesses.
The system for combating profiling under
this bill will rely heavily on the accumulation
of citizen complaints, which when analyzed
together can point to patterns of systematic
profiling - but in order for there to be data to
analyze, profiling victims have to complain.
In Portland, where profiling is already
prohibited, the number of official complaints
submitted doesn’t reflect the bureau’s Stops
Data Collection. The 2014 report shows
African Americans, Hispanics and Native
Americans were disproportionately pulled
over for minor equipment violations. The
report also showed African Americans and
Hispanics were more likely than whites to be
searched during traffic stops, but they were
far less likely than whites to be found with
contraband.
But, according to Derek Reinke, senior
management analyst at Portland’s
Independent Police Review, only 19
complaints alleging “disparate treatm ent” -
his agency’s category for profiling - were
submitted against Portland police in 2014. It’s
a number, he says, that is pretty typical.
To date, he says the commission has not
reviewed any complaints of disparate
treatm ent that had enough evidence to lead
■
to |
serious
disciplinary
action.
According to the Portland Police
Bureau’s Discipline Guide, if an officer was
found to have committed disparate treatment,
the punishment would range from one day
suspension without pay to three work weeks
suspension without pay, depending on how
many prior violations the officer has
incurred, and a wide range of other factors
including the officer’s general performance
and whether or not the action led to injury or
property damage.
Reinke says that oftentimes when someone
submits a complaint alleging profiling, when
his agency looks at the police report, it might
say the officer stopped them because they fit
the description of a suspect
“There isn’t typically much we can do in
term s of sustaining and disciplining when it’s
trying to prove a thought in an officer’s
head,” he explains. “That’s pretty tough to
do.”
The passage of House Bill 2002, Reinke
says, will not make it any easier to prove
these cases. He says the state law will
strengthen PPB’s current policy, “but we’ve
certainly had the authority to hold people
accountable for that for a long, long time, If
it’s fairly obvious that the person’s out there
just pulling over people that m eet a certain
profile without any other reasons, then we’ve
got a problem,” he says. “That kind of a thing
could lead to some very serious discipline,
but we just haven’t seen that kind of a case
with that kind of evidence.”
The legislation requires law enforcement
agencies statewide to adopt policies
prohibiting profiling and procedures for
accepting and investigating complaints by
January 1, 2016. Departments will also be
required to send copies of complaints to a
data review committee supported by Portland
State University, which will be funded with
$250,000 of general fund money.
The legal definition of profiling under the
bill includes bias based on a person’s age,
race, ethnicity, language, color, religion,
national origin, mental disability, political
affiliation, sexual orientation, gender or
housing status.
According to Kimberly McCullough, the
legislative director at Oregon ACLU, the
passage of the bill “is a very positive and very
powerful step toward addressing profiling.
“The fact that it’s going to include all of
these categories will be a really good
opportunity for educating law enforcement
about the fact that profiling isn’t just based
on race, it happens with all these other
things,” she says. “Policies and training alone
are never enough, but it certainly is part of
the equation.”
The bill also establishes a work group that
will prepare reports and make
recommendations to the Legislature based
on analysis of complaints alleging profiling.
Before the passage of this bill, there was no
statewide policy regarding profiling, nor was
there a central agency to collect data on
profiling.
Center for Intercultural Organizing
originally brought the bill to legislature in
2013, and again this session. Inger
McDowell, the End Profiling Director for the
organization, says many victims of profiling
may fail to complain because they don’t know
how. “The other issue,” she says» “is fear of
retribution.”
See PROFILING, page 5