"RACIAL PROFILING IS A LAZY METHOD OF LAW ENFORCEMENT."

Veterans of law enforcement who were police officers during the 1980s and 1990s, when the "war on drugs" was in full swing and racial profiling was rampant, are among the country's most knowledgeable experts on the effectiveness of racial profiling in fighting crime. Here are some of their comments:

Barbara A. Markham

Barbara A. Markham has been a police officer with the Oak Point Police Department in North Texas since 1983. She "Telephone interview, Oct. 21, 2003.

has been an undercover narcotics investigator since 1986, and is the recipient of awards and letters of commendation from the

Department of Treasury-Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms for her investigative work. She has also been an outspoken critic of the Texas police for engaging in racial profiling in the enforcement of narcotics laws - profiling that has focused virtually exclusively on African Americans. In a recent interview, Officer Markham told the ACLU:

"Racial profiling is utilized when you have no intelligence and you're just casting a wide net and having to use a process of elimination out of that wide net. Racial profiling is a lazy method for law enforcement. You're not using investigative leads; you're not using any investigative skill, all you're doing is casting a wide net against one group, one segment of society, and that's what we call 'going fishing,' and you're going to come up empty-handed. The better way is to simply investigate terrorism by behaviors exhibited by specific individuals. It's not the color of one's skin or their ethnicity that should indict them or bring them under police scrutiny. It should be their behaviors or actions - what they do." "

Hiram Monserrate was a patrol officer with the New York Police Department for twelve years. Today, he is a prominent member of the New York City Council, where he sits on the Public Safety Committee. Councilman Monserrate also founded the Latino Officers Association. He is an ardent critic of racial profiling by the police, and, like Barbara Markham, he does not believe ethnic profiling is effective as a law enforcement tool. He told the ACLU:

Hiram Monserrate

"It's easy to go to an area like Jackson Heights [Queens, New York] searching out South Asian males under the guise of counterterrorism. It's easy to do that. It's also easy to detain lots of innocent people. I think that is neither a good course of action, nor is it the best use of law enforcement resources. The better way is to do the intelligence work and investigation that needs to be done, and be able to identify individuals where there is reasonable suspicion to believe they are in fact engaged in some type of criminal activity, and then go to those

"Live interview at councilman's office, Oct. 16, 2003.

An ACLU Report

individuals and stop them to question them and ultimately detain them. Good police work is not about cutting corners. It's about using resources and being intelligent. Law enforcement going out and engaging in sweeps and random stops really produces very little in quality arrests." "

Jerry Sanders was a member of the San Diego Police Department for 26 years, and for the last six of those years he served as the department's chief of police. Chief Sanders was credited with bringing about a dramatic reduction in crime and for building community-police partnerships. He was also the first chief of police to announce that he would begin collecting traffic stops data on a voluntary basis in order to determine whether or not his department's officers were engaging in racial profiling. He told the ACLU:

"One of the things I can remember being up on the bulletin boards at work was a sign that said, 'Random patrol produces random results.' If you're doing this randomly, just trying to blanket places, I think you get pretty random results. I don't think you get a high hit rate. Right after 9/11 everybody wanted a quick fix. I was certainly concerned and I wanted things done quickly, too. But it takes time to investigate, to find out who was involved in these things, and good investigative techniques are not always fast. I don't think you get a quick fix by stopping everybody and getting their names, and then trying to figure out what's going on. I think a much more targeted response would be a much better way of doing that without alienating huge parts of the community.""

This is an accurate description of the Justice Department's post-9/11 investigation. In April 2003 the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Justice issued a comprehensive 198-page report revealing in detail for the first time the Justice Department's policies, directives, and activities in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Entitled The September 11 Detainees: A Review of the Treatment of Aliens Held on Immigration Charges in Connection with the Investigation of the September 11 Attacks (the OIG report), it was based on a year-long investigation that included extensive interviews with federal law enforcement officials and agents, and with some of the detainees. One of the OIG report's findings was that since the attorney general issued a "hold until cleared" policy for all aliens arrested in the 9/11 investigation, law enforcement personnel had to spend time identifying the detainees, investigating their backgrounds and analyzing whatever information came in from the CIA and other agencies. And each of these investigations was so time-consuming that "[t]he FBI "PENTTBOM is an acronym for Pentagon/Twin Towers Bombings.

"[The FBI's] resources were insufficient to permit the group to analyze the CIA information in a more timely manner for a number of reasons. First, according to one of the SSAS (supervisory special agent) assigned to the project, the volume of cases was simply too great. One of the FBI requests to the CIA for information contained the names of 190 detainees. Second, the SSA pointed to many technical difficulties and 'growing pains' they faced when they first started in late November 2001... Third, many of the people working on this project were not focused exclusively on this task, due to the many demands on the FBI. Finally, some of the cases required contacting FBI offices overseas or other agencies, which took time, especially because the FBI offices in the Middle Eastern countries also were over-burdened at the time." (OIG report, p. 61)

As was the case with racial profiling duning the “war on drugs," ethnic profiling alienates the communities whose cooperation is essential to the gathering of good intelligence. As Police Chief Sanders cxplained.

"Whole communities get very upset when they see that pretty soon everybody that they love has been arrested, and I think that creates far more problems. The issue is one of community trust. If you're relying on the public to assist you in just about any way, and if you're stopping people in communities of color, and your stops are out of sync with the way they are in every other community because you're simply stop ping people because you think they may look suspicious, we found that it's awfully difficult for those communities to support and trust the efforts of what the police are doing.”

Councilman Monserrate, whose district is comprised of a section of New York City with a large South Asian population, also commented on this problem:

"I do know that in the South Asian community. there is a lot of concern about people being taken off the street and detained without charge. That leaves an aura of fear and suspicion. And I think that fear and suspicion largely hampers the police mandate to help protect property and lives. The best way is for the communities to be partners with the police and not to be in fear of the police, because that hampers public safety."

An ACLU Report____

The human costs of our government's ethnic profiling policies are incalculable: hard-working, law-abiding men suddenly finding themselves shackled hand and foot, heid incommunicado in solitary confinement for months at a time, farmiles separated; homes and businesses lost, and lives turned upside down. For many. the greatest loss of all was the bitter discovery that their adopted country, which promised freedom and opportunity, no longer wanted them.

In November 2002, frustrated by the continuing refusal of the Department of Justice to reveal the identities and happenstances of most of the post-9'11 detainees, the ACLU decided to conduct its own investigation. With the assistance of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, we located 21 detainees who had been deported to Pakistan, or who had left the US. voluntarily to avoid indefinite detention. We met with these men in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad. Their accounts, one of which is detailed below, are a powerful indictment of our government's abuse of power. Justice Thurgood Marshall once wrote:

r

"History teaches that grave threats to liberly often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure. The World War II camp cases. and the Red Scare and McCarthy-era internal subversion cases, are only the most extreme reminders that when we allow fundamental freedoms to be sacrificed in the name of real or perceived exigency, we invariably come to regret it."