Correction appended.
Hope High School senior Stephen Dy said he is frequently stopped by the police in his neighborhood due to his tattoos and Cambodian heritage. "Most people assume that gangs out here (in Providence) are majority South East Asian," he said, "so when they see a Cambodian, or a Laotian or a Vietnamese kid, they assume he's in a gang."
Rep. Grace Diaz, D-Providence, introduced a bill to fight racial profiling at the beginning of the year. Diaz introduced a similar bill last year that passed the House Judiciary Committee but died on the House floor.
Diaz said she made some changes to the previous bill, adding restrictions to police questioning of pedestrians and passengers at traffic stops. Police patrolling a neighborhood are not likely to have probable cause for searching or questioning people on the street, she said. Police are already prohibited by state statute from racial profiling, but a person must produce identification if police present justification for stopping them.
Dy has served as a youth coordinator at Providence Youth Student Movement for three years. He said when police stop him, they ask, "What are you doing? Why are you in this neighborhood? What set you roll with? Do you have any guns on you?"
Diaz also included a provision that does not allow "consent searches" of juveniles without cause or reason as a protective measure. Consent searches are only permitted if the individual gives permission.
Dy said he feels he does not have an option when he is searched. "They wouldn't even ask. They just tell you get on the wall, put your hands on the car or lay down on the floor," he said. "If I try to come off as defensive, it ends up coming off as offensive."
Racial profiling has been a contentious issue for a decade, said Steve Brown, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Rhode Island. "African-Americans and Latinos feel that they're being discriminated against, that they're being pulled over for no reason other than the color of their skin."
In 2001, state law enforcement officers began collecting data on every traffic stop in their jurisdiction in accordance with the Rhode Island Traffic Stop Statistics Act, which was enacted in 2000 to monitor racial profiling. In most communities in the state, non-white drivers are stopped at rates disproportionate to their presence in the driving population, according to a report summarizing the data released by Northeastern University. The first year the project began, the Rhode Island ACLU sued the Providence Police Department for failing to comply with the law and reporting inaccurate data.
Brown called the police's response "very disappointing." Many departments have issued statements denying the existence of racial profiling based on an absence of recorded complaints.
Latino and African-American advocacy groups in Rhode Island, as well as Providence Youth Student Movement, complained to the ACLU about racial profiling, Steve Brown said.
But Anthony Pesare, chief of Middletown Police Department and president of the Rhode Island Police Chiefs' Association, said Diaz's bill will "handcuff" the police by eliminating some of the tools police officers need to protect communities. It is important to engage in "simple conversation" with suspicious characters, said Charles Swenson, deputy chief major of East Providence Police Department.
"We are all very much in favor of participation and data collection and very much against racial profiling," Pesare said, but he said he believes the bill would challenge Supreme Court rulings that allow police to obtain identification.
Swenson said he is skeptical of racial profiling data like that found in Northeastern University's report. "It's not as accurate as (the victims of racial profiling) would have you believe," he said. "I have heard some people speak of a humiliating story (of being patted down by police), when in fact if you talk to the retaining officer, the real facts are exposed."
Diaz expressed her appreciation for the difficult job facing police officers but said she wants to set some new limits.
Dy said he intends to testify at the State House in favor of this legislation for the second time. "I feel like if we have to follow rules, they should have to follow rules, too," he said.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed a series of quotes about racial profiling to Charles Swenson, deputy chief major of East Providence Police Department. In fact, those quotes should have been attributed to Chief of East Providence Police Joseph Tavares. The Herald regrets the error.
