24 towns yet to file policy on profiling
Posted on Monday, March 31, 2008
Horace Watkins is fresh on the job as Eudora’s top cop.
He and his two full-time officers keep busy dealing with the usual burglaries and drugrelated crimes.
Racial profiling hasn’t been on his radar, said Watkins, named Eudora’s interim police chief last week.
“You don’t see very many whites. We don’t have a problem with racial profiling,” said Watkins, who is black as are his two officers.
Watkins said that it has never been an issue in his 14 years of police work in the Chicot County town.
Still, Eudora’s police department, along with those of 23 other towns across Arkansas, hasn’t complied with a 2007 state law requiring every law enforcement agency in the state to create a policy to avoid racial profiling and submit it to the state for review.
And Eudora shares characteristics with some of the other towns out of compliance: It’s small — 2, 819 residents — and most of its residents are of the same race.
Of the 24 towns without plans against racial profiling, all but two are either predominantly black or white. Eudora is the largest; the smallest is the Faulkner County community of Mount Vernon, population 144, of whom 99 percent are white.
Eudora is 84 percent black, according to the U. S. Census Bureau.
In the Crawford County town of Mulberry, 96 percent of its 1, 627 residents are white and its police department hasn’t submitted a policy to the state.
Police Chief Tim Porter’s three full-time officers have all had training on how to avoid racial profiling, defined by Arkansas Code Annotated 12-12-1401 as “the practice of a law enforcement officer’s relying to any degree on race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion in selecting which individuals to subject to routine investigatory activities.” But he, like Eudora’s Watkins, said his department hasn’t had any complaints about racial profiling.
Both chiefs said that they didn’t submit their policies because of paperwork problems or ignorance of the law, not apathy or racial bias.
Porter, who is white as are his full-time officers, said his force stays off Interstate 40, eliminating most of the occasions an officer might stop a person because of race.
“Most of the racial profiling you see is drug interdictions on interstates,” Porter said. “We don’t even get up there [onto I-40 ]. We have plenty of other things to be doing.” Dale Charles, president of the Arkansas State Conference of Branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said he most often hears complaints about racial profiling from West Memphis and Texarkana, which are interstate highway entry and exit points, but has also received complaints from Hope, Forrest City and other towns along Interstates 30 and 40.
“One act of racial profiling can be devastating to a family or individual,” Charles said. “It’s a growing issue across this state and across the nation.” No state agency tracks racial profiling complaints. In 2005, a statewide task force recommended that the Arkansas State Police and an independent review body create a centralized complaint and investigation process, but it never became law.
Since 1999, 28 states have enacted legislation or issued gubernatorial directives against racial profiling. Federal legislation has been introduced in the U. S Congress to require states to ban racial profiling or risk losing some highway funds and other grants, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Act 1048 of 2007 requires the Division of Legislative Audit to forward the policies to the attorney general’s office along with a list of police departments that don’t submit a policy.
The majority of the state’s police departments have complied.
Little Rock police officers receive training about racial profiling while in the department’s police academy and again in the department’s ongoing training programs, said Lt. Terry Hastings. The city’s policy dates to 2006.
Many departments used materials from the state’s Commission on Law Enforcement Standards and Training.
Brian Marshall, deputy director of the Office of Law Enforcement Standards, said his agency sent each department a written lesson plan for racial profiling classes that would satisfy the law.
That’s what Shannon Hills Police Chief Richard Friend used. He said he wasn’t aware that his department must send its policy to the state.
His 11 officers have all received training, Friend said. Satisfying the reporting requirement “will be easy to correct,” he said.
Gabe Holmstrom, spokesman for Attorney General Dustin Mc-Daniel, said that since December a committee of assistant attorneys general has been reviewing 355 submitted policies. A letter to the 24 delinquent agencies will be sent “ASAP,” Holmstrom said.
McDaniel’s office is charged with enforcing the law, but the statute doesn’t include specific penalties for noncompliance.
Holmstrom declined to say what or if any action might be taken by McDaniel for those departments in noncompliance, saying his office “was still in the [review ] process.” Having the state review all 379 police departments policies is fine, but Charles said paperwork goes only so far.
“It won’t do any good unless the police chief and city enforce it,” he said.
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