Police agencies would have to develop policies to prevent racial profiling under a bill submitted by a Cumberland County legislator.
The bill would create a law banning racial profiling – which is already implicitly illegal as a civil rights violation – and create an advisory committee to study the issue and recommend methods of collecting data that might indicate racial profiling.
Racial profiling occurs when a law enforcement officer investigates a person or stops a motorist solely because of that person's race or ethnicity. The bill would not prevent officers from considering race as one of a number of identifying factors when seeking to apprehend a specific suspect.
"This is an opportunity for us to say, without a doubt, we don't buy into racial profiling. Our police don't use racial profiling, and we as the state police and municipal police forces are going to make sure our officers understand what racial profiling is and why it's wrong," said state Sen. Lawrence Bliss, D-South Portland, the bill's primary sponsor.
Some officials, however, say they don't see the bill as necessary because the practice is already banned; is something officers are taught about at the Maine Criminal Justice Academy; and hasn't been identified as a problem, at least by oversight agencies.
"I don't know of any complaints of racial profiling, and I don't know of any departments in the state that engage in racial profiling," said Robert Schwartz, executive director of the Maine Chiefs of Police Association.
"Before you do a policy or change the law or do anything to prohibit it, I would almost think you have to document that there is a problem," he said.
Attorney General Janet Mills said she has not taken a position on the bill – which has just been submitted and has yet to be assigned to a legislative committee – and will listen to testimony when it is given a hearing.
However, she said her office can already take action against an officer or department if it engages in racial profiling, and she said she hoped anyone who experienced profiling would notify her office.
"In my experience of 32 years practicing law, 19 years as a prosecutor, it's always been the case that probable cause or reasonable suspicion for a stop can never be based solely on somebody's race or ethnicity or religion or national origin," Mills said.
"In recent years in particular, our officers across the state of Maine have been trained as best you can to not engage in such activities," she said.
But not everyone shares that view.
ACTIVIST CITES SON'S EXPERIENCE
David Lourie is chairman of the legal redress committee of the Portland chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
"We get lots of calls about racial profiling, as well as harassment," he said. "You have to have your head in the sand to not see it happens, if you have any contact with persons of color in the state – not just black people, but Hispanics probably even more so, because of the immigration status.
"The purpose of this bill is hopefully to stop it, or at least be able to prove to people who don't believe it's happening that it is happening," said Lourie, who helped work on the bill.
Lourie recalled the experience of his own sons, one of whom is African-American, when pulled over in a Portland-area community because of a problem with the license plate on a new car.
The officer, he said, was much more interested in his black son, a passenger, than his white son, the car's driver.
Lourie said that nobody, regardless of race, should be pulled over or questioned without a good reason to suspect him or her of wrongdoing. But he said that officers have such discretion that often problems aren't apparent until a department's statistics are analyzed.
TAILORING...
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