On June 9-10, 1999, President Bill Clinton, Attorney General Janet
Reno, civil rights leaders, police, and other government leaders
participated in the Strengthening Police-Community Relationships
conference in Washington, D.C. During the conference, President
Clinton called racial profiling a "morally indefensible, deeply
corrosive practice" and further stated that "racial profiling is in
fact the opposite of good police work, where actions are based on
hard facts, not stereotypes. It is wrong, it is destructive, and it
must stop." As a result of increased national concern over racial
profiling, the President directed federal agencies to begin
gathering data on the race and ethnicity of persons stopped for
future analysis. At a later session of the same conference,
participants discussed the design and implementation of racial
profiling data collection systems. That discussion featured
presentations by state and local jurisdictions where efforts were
already under way to collect data on the race, ethnicity, and
gender of the individuals police stop. This guide is an outgrowth
of that breakout session. As its title suggests, the guide is
designed to provide law enforcement, state and local elected
officials, civil rights leaders, community organizations, and other
local stakeholders with strategies and practices for gathering and
analyzing data about police stops. By providing information about
the nature, characteristics, and demographics of police enforcement
patterns, these data collection efforts have the potential for
shifting the rhetoric surrounding racial profiling from
accusations, anecdotal stories, and stereotypes to a more rational
discussion about the appropriate allocation of police resources.
Well-planned and comprehensive data collection efforts can serve as
a catalyst for nurturing and shaping this type of community and
police discussion. This guide is a blueprint that police and
communities can use to develop data collection systems. It offers
practical information about implementing these systems and
analyzing the data. The guide is not intended to serve as a
comprehensive and thorough inventory of all existing data
collection systems. It focuses on providing detailed descriptions
of data collection efforts in a few selected sites: San Jose,
California, which has designed a simple letter-code system allowing
information to be collected verbally (via radio) or by computer;
San Diego, California, which utilizes an online data collection
system; North Carolina, the first state to collect data on traffic
stops pursuant to state legislation; Great Britain, which uses a
paper based system to collect information on both traffic and
pedestrian stops and searches; and New Jersey, which is collecting
information on traffic stops pursuant to a consent decree with the
U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). These sites were first identified
by DOJ in preparation for the conference and represent various
population sizes and geographic locations. Site visits were later
made to obtain further information about each site's data
collection process. Since the conference, there has been a flurry
of activity in this area and hundreds of jurisdictions have begun
to initiate data collection efforts. This resource guide is
organized into four main sections: Chapter 2: An introduction to
the nature of the problem of racial profiling; Chapter 3: A general
description of data collection and its limitations; Chapter 4:
Study-site descriptions and analysis; Chapter 5: Recommendations
and future goals. The "selected site" approach of this resource
guide is intended to encourage and guide police and communities as
they begin to take action to evaluate allegations of racial
profiling and to help police and communities learn from one
another's experiences and successes.
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