New guidelines on racial profiling released by the Obama administration failed Monday to quell calls for an overhaul to how police target minorities suspected of crimes.
Attorney General Eric Holder outlined new rules on Monday that banned profiling not just based on race and ethnicity, but also religion, gender and sexual orientation.
Civil rights leaders welcomed the revisions but expressed disappointment with loopholes for border agents and those screening travelers at airports. National security exemptions allow many practices to continue that were not addressed by President George W. Bush’s ban on racial profiling in 2003.
Perhaps most lacking, advocates said, were reforms that would apply to local police departments, now under heavy scrutiny following black suspects being killed by white officers in Ferguson, Mo., and New York City.
“We urge the Department of Justice to continue its work beyond this guidance to prevent the street-level profiling which is ongoing across the country and to hold agencies accountable for engaging in profiling,” said Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
“It does not ban the offensive practice of ‘mapping’ American communities based on stereotypes, nor does it appear to curtail the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s authority to engage in unlawful and abusive surveillance of innocent Americans,” he added.
The long-awaited update on racial profiling comes as the administration is attempting to overhaul police practices in predominantly minority communities and as President Obama tries to assuage growing criticism of his approach to racial issues.
The president had already called for heightened oversight of the militarization of local police departments and funding for body cameras for up to 50,000 cops. But those measures, like the new racial profiling rules, received a less-than-enthusiastic response from civil libertarians.
The change in racial profiling parameters will cover federal law enforcement officials but are solely guidance for state and local police officers, unless they are participating in federal investigations, according to the Justice Department.
Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Ben Cardin, D-Md., among others, had pushed the White House to adopt rules that would cover local agencies.
“I can definitely understand why a lot of people are disappointed today,” said a Democratic Senate aide who has worked extensively on the issue. “A lot of it seems cosmetic. There’s plenty left to get done — and now might have been the best time to do it.”
The police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson and chokehold death of Eric Garner in Staten Island have put the spotlight on local police like never before in Obama’s presidency. But White House officials said the president was being careful to balance national security demands with civil rights concerns.
“This is a dynamic that particularly plays out in securing the transportation sector, that we want to make sure that we are protecting the civil liberties of the traveling public, but at the same time, we also need to preserve the overall security of the transportation system,” said White House press secretary Josh Earnest. “And there are complicated ways in which we can apply this policy that balances both significant concerns.”
But civil liberties groups argued that the Obama White House was taking the same default position as the Bush administration, erring on the side of protecting the homeland rather than privacy rights.
“It’s baffling that even as the government recognizes that bias-based policing is patently unacceptable, it gives a green light for the FBI, TSA, and CBP to profile racial, religious and other minorities at or in the vicinity of the border and in certain national security contexts, and does not apply the guidance to most state and local law enforcement,” said Laura Murphy, Washington legislative office director for the American Civil Liberties Union. “This guidance is not an adequate response to the crisis of racial profiling in America.”
“[It] still allows law enforcement to engage in massive data gathering to map communities based on race, ethnicity or religion,” added Farhana Khera, president of Muslim Advocates, a legal advocacy group in Washington.
Khera said the rules let the government continue to “recruit informants based on race, religion or other protected characteristics without any known connection to criminal activity and spy on Americans and infiltrate their houses of worship also without any evidence of wrongdoing.”
