Racial profiling by Texas police is such a serious concern that it may be necessary to sponsor congressional hearings and possibly withhold the state’s federal transportation funding, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) said in an interview this week.
“I’m enormously saddened that in 2005, we haven’t reached an understanding about the disproportionate impact of racial profiling,” Jackson Lee told BlackAmericaWeb.com.
Four decades after civil rights legislation was passed, Jackson Lee said, there is no excuse for blacks and people of color to be disproportionately targeted by police. She said sanctions against Texas should be applied if law enforcement officials don’t correct the problem soon.
“I will bring this issue to the attention of the House,” Jackson Lee said. “I’d like to see hearings on this issue, and their federal transportation funding should be questioned if they don’t respond to this problem.”
Jackson Lee was responding to a recent study that said police throughout Texas stop and search black and Latino drivers at higher rates than whites. When whites are stopped, the study said, officers are more likely to find guns and drugs.
The study’s findings show wide disparities between minority and white motorists who were stopped and searched. The data was compiled from more than 1,000 Texas law enforcement departments that were required to record information under state law.
Entitled “Don't Mind If I Take a Look, Do Ya?,” the analysis examined 2003 statistics provided by 1,060 law enforcement agencies on consensual searches of vehicles during traffic stops.
The survey concluded that three out of five law enforcement agencies reported conducting searches of minority drivers at higher rates than whites. It also said police searched blacks and Latinos at higher rates and that police found illegal items on whites at a higher rate than blacks.
“This report suggests that police in Texas are not only racially profiling, but are also policing in an inefficient, ineffective way," Will Harrell, executive director of the ACLU of Texas, told reporters.
James McLaughlin Jr., executive director of the Texas Police Chiefs Association, told BlackAmericaWeb.com Wednesday that he was traveling and had not seen the report. He also said such studies are often times flawed because of “faulty research methods.”
“I haven’t seen the report, but I hope to see it when I’m back in the office,” McLaughlin said.
The study’s recommendations to eliminate racial profiling include establishing an independent statewide repository for reports and adopting uniform reporting standards for racial profiling data.
The report also recommended banning consent searches, which are searches that occur when an officer seeks a motorist's permission to look in their vehicles for illegal items, even if there is no probable cause. The study found three out of five Texas police agencies were more likely to ask blacks and Latinos than whites for a consent search.
The study, conducted by Steward Research Group, was commissioned by the ACLU of Texas, the NAACP Texas branch, the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition and the state chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens.
Hawaii, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Minnesota have banned consensual searches as a result of racial profiling. Nationally, more than half of all black men reported that they've been victims of racial profiling by police, according to a 2001 survey by the Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University.
“We need a quick remedy,” Jackson Lee said of racial profiling in Texas, “and we need to clean up our state.”
