Born Suspect – NAACP – September 2014: “For more than a century the NAACP has been engaged in the fight for a more fair and effective system of policing in America. Indeed, the first case the Association took on after its inception in 1910 involved defending a sharecropper from an illegal police raid on his farm. And to date, there are more than a dozen national resolutions that emphasize the organization’s commitment to advocate for greater law enforcement accountability. Yet, the recent death of young men of color, including Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri—both unarmed African American men—at the hands of police officers reveals that the battle for justice and accountability continues. In 2012, following the death of teenager Trayvon Martin, and building on the renewed national conversation about racial profiling that ensued as a result of this tragedy, and also on the momentum of decades of advocacy to fight stop-and-frisk abuses in New York City, the NAACP helped leverage a successful collaborative campaign to pass anti-racial profiling and police accountability measures in New York City. In Born Suspect, the New York campaign is used as a framework to open a dialogue on racial profiling across the country. To do this, the NAACP conducted the most up-to-date analysis of state racial profiling laws, analyzing these policies to ascertain whether they include the necessary components to make these policies effective and enforceable. This analysis found that:
• 20 state laws do not explicitly prohibit racial profiling
• 30 states have some form of racial profiling laws on the books
• 17 state laws ban the use of pretextual traffic stops
• 17 states criminalize violations of their anti-profiling laws
• 3 states allow individuals to seek injunctive relief to stop officers or police departments from racial profiling
• 17 states require mandatory data collection for all stops and searches; 15 require analysis and publication of racial profiling data
• 17 states require the creation of commissions to review and respond to complaints of racial profiling
• No states meet all of the NAACP criteria of an effective racial profiling law.”