Calling all profilees

Posted at 1:32 PM on April 10, 2008 by Bob Collins

A release from the Minnesota chapter of the ACLU today reveals it is collecting information from people who feel they've been racially profiled.

Of course, this has been done before in these parts and not much happened as a result.

It was about five years ago that the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota collected data on racial profiling from 65 police departments in Minnesota, under a 2001 bill at the Legislature to collect the data.

The statewide report said:

The pattern for Blacks and Latinos existed in nearly every participating jurisdiction. Whites were stopped at a greater than expected rate in only 8 of the 60 jurisdictions having enough stops to determine statistical significance. On the other hand, Blacks were over-stopped in every jurisdiction but one and Latinos were over-stopped in all but 5 of the 43 jurisdictions in which statistical significance could be determined. Similarly, in all but 2 of the 37 jurisdictions in which there were discretionary searches of Blacks and Whites, Blacks were subjected to searches at a higher rate than Whites. Latinos were subjected to these searches at a higher rate than Whites in all of the jurisdictions in which there were discretionary searches of Latinos.

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