racial profiling is un-American

Funny, I thought the 'war on terror' was an attempt to protect our democratic and free society, not to eviscerate it.


Amnesty condemns US use of racial profiling

Mon Sep 13, 7:16 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Racial profiling by US law enforcement agencies has grown over the past three years to cover one in nine Americans, rights group Amnesty International said in a report.

"State and federal agencies, under the guise of fighting terrorism, have expanded the use of this degrading, discriminatory and dangerous practice," said Curt Goering, deputy executive director for Amnesty International USA.

According to its study, some 32 million Americans have been subjected to profiling, defined as the targeting of people because of their ethnic or religious background.

And some 87 million Americans are at risk of racial profiling during their lifetime.

Amnesty said use of profiling has seen a major increase since the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

The practice "violates human rights, undermines national security and simply does not work," said Goering.

Timothy Lewis, a former district court judge and federal prosecutor, said that racial profiling is not only ineffective, it violates the US Constitution. "It is wrong, and nothing that happened on September 11, 2001 makes it right," he said.

The Amnesty report pointed to "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, British shoe-bomber Richard Reid and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh -- who escaped as police searched for Arab suspects -- as examples of people who did not fit the standard terrorist profiles.

President George W. Bush vowed to end racial profiling in US law enforcement in February 2001, but the ban is a policy -- not law -- and has no enforcement teeth, according to the report.

Bush "has failed to support any federal legislative effort" to eliminate racial profiling in the country, Amnesty said.

Cathy Harris, a senior US Customs inspector, complained in 1998 about racial profiling practices that included strip searches of black and Hispanic women. Following the complaints Harris said that Customs changed their practices and the group saw drug arrests increase by 300 percent.

But following the September 11 attacks and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, Customs merged with the Immigration and Naturalization Service and 20 other federal agencies -- and Customs "is slowly going back to its old ways," Harris said.

"The targeting of certain groups -- specifically Arab and Muslim Americans and travelers who are citizens of Arab and Muslim nations -- has increased," she said.

According to Amnesty, people of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent and those of the Muslim and Sikh faiths are most at risk, especially since the September 11 attacks.

Amnesty wants the US Congress as well as state and local governments to enact comprehensive legislation banning the practice.

Amnesty's 50-page report documents cases of people pulled over by police and treated as suspects solely based on their looks, as well as people of Middle Eastern and south Asian descent who do not call police or the fire department because they fear they will be targeted based on their race.

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"A State cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws." - Justice Anthony Kennedy