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SD-40: Assemblyman Greg Ball Opposes Ban On Racial Profiling

by: DeWitt

Tue Jun 15, 2010 at 15:04:28 PM EDT

Greg Ball Supports The NJ Model of Police-Community Relations

The recent report from the governor's task force on police-on-police shootings highlights the need to combat conscious and unconscious racial bias that leads to the tragic death of innocent people and undermines police-community relations by criminalizing entire communities in the eyes of some law enforcement officers and sowing distrust of the police among civilian populations.

To combat the scourge of racial profiling, the New York State Assembly, with bipartisan support, passed legislation (A.1676A) prohibiting racial and ethnic profiling and requiring police departments to collect and maintain data on traffic stops and "stop and frisk" actions, which would be submitted regularly to the Division of Criminal Justice Services.

Predictably, Assemblyman Greg Ball voted with party leadership against this very modest proposal to better understand and counter racial profiling. Ball's knee-jerk opposition to civil rights legislation cannot honestly be explained by concerns about "handcuffing the police" as the New York City Police Department, widely regarded as one of the most effective law enforcement agencies in the world, already mandates reports for stop and frisk actions by police with what is known as a UF-250 form. In essence, this bill would simply take the NYPD's sensible practices and make them state policy.

DeWitt :: SD-40: Assemblyman Greg Ball Opposes Ban On Racial Profiling

Presumably, the real worry among at least some opponents of A.1676A is that it will actually reveal racial profiling. A statistical review of the NYPD's UF-250 data by the New York Attorney General's Office found that "there is a strong statistical correlation between race and likelihood of being 'stopped'" and that "even when crime data is taken into account, minorities are still "stopped" at a higher rate than would be predicted by both demographics and crime rates." Even more worrying from a civil libertarian perspective, according to the report, "in roughly one out of every seven "stops" conducted by the NYPD, the facts that the police officer articulates for making the "stop," as stated in the UF-250 form, fail to meet the legal threshold of 'reasonable suspicion.'"

The results of such reporting is clearly upsetting, but problems cannot be corrected if we lack any way of monitoring them. Of course, an ambitious career politician seeking to launch yourself into higher office by terrifying the public about unpopular minorities and importing an Arizona-style immigration law might be singularly disinterested in attempting to document and ameliorate racial bias. Indeed, required monitoring of racial profiling would certainly expose an Arizona style law for the fraud it is and refute dissembling demagogues like Greg Ball who claim their anti-immigrant rhetoric and programs are colorblind, when in reality they clearly prompt the harassment of immigrant and native New Yorkers of all backgrounds.

Cross-posted at The Ball Monitor.

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SD-40: Assemblyman Greg Ball Opposes Ban On Racial Profiling | 1 comments

Take a Second to Listen to what Ball Has Actually Said: (0.00 / 0)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

If you actually listen to what he is saying, he is telling a lot of unpleasant truth: 1) Democrats want open borders for potential political advantage; 2) Republicans want open borders to keep labor costs low; and 3) a lot of people who come here illegally are treated like "indentured servents."

I would add to this: 1) a fence will work as well for us as it did for the DDR; 2) the way to deal with this is at the employer level; 3) the laws are broken and must be reformed; and 4) people who came here illegally and kept working through the downturn should not be the bill-payers.

Lots of people we should let stay, came here illegally. A lot of people are confused about their status . . . and so is the INS at times. The problem may be that we need to adjust our borders.

by: John Minehan @ Tue Jun 15, 2010 at 21:38:09 PM UTC