Civil Rights Groups Call for Action Against Racial Profiling

The Connecticut Civil Rights Coalition urged police chiefs across Connecticut to address racial profiling and the state legislature to strengthen the law against it in the wake of the indictments of three police officers and a sergeant on charges of violating the civil rights of Latino people in East Haven.

"We felt that this is the right time for us to come forward and to say, with one voice, representing many different communities, that discrimination against one part of our community is discrimination against all," said Mongi Dhaouadi, executive director of the Connecticut Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, at a press conference Wednesday at the Legislative Office Building in Hartford.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations is a member of the coalition, along with the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, the Civic Trust Public Lobbying Company, the Hart Monitor, Trinity Stop the Raids and City Councilor Luis Cotto.

The coalition called on municipal police departments to develop and enforce strong, internal anti-profiling policies and on state legislators to fix and fund the decade-old Alvin W. Penn Racial Profiling Prohibition Act. The act prohibits police from stopping, detaining or arresting anyone solely on the basis of race and requires police departments to collect data on traffic stops and enforcement actions.

"This is a wake-up call for state leaders," said ACLU Legal Director Sandy Staub. "We've been working for two years to figure out how to get the Penn Act enforced in this state from the top down."

Had the Penn Act been properly funded and enforced from its beginning, she said, the pattern and practice of racial profiling and civil rights violations now coming to light in East Haven would have been obvious.

The coalition also urged that the responsibility for compiling and analyzing the data and issuing reports must be shifted from the African-American Affairs Commission, which has never had adequate resources for the task, to the Office of Policy and Management. Its other recommendations are:

• Fund the Penn Act's data collection and analysis requirements.
• Mandate immediate distribution and use of a uniform data form.
• Add religion as a reported category.
• Replace the "unknown" option under race, gender or ethnicity with "other" and a blank, consistent with the stopping officer's duty to report perceptions of race and ethnicity.
• Improve statewide training to include the data collection process.
• Mandate cultural competency training