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Louisiana Racial Profiling
08/06/08 - 10:10 AM
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Legislators should toughen a law passed in 2001 to prohibit racial profiling by Louisiana law enforcement agencies, the American Civil Liberties Union said.

“The law is not preventing racial profiling, or giving departments a way to track it and hold people accountable for it,” said Liza Grote, who led a study of three parishes from which the organization said it has received the greatest number of complaints of racial profiling. “There’s still a lot of work to be done.”

Grote is urging legislators to close a loophole in the law that makes it difficult to detect the practice. Under current law, arresting agencies are not required to record a suspect’s race if they have a policy against racial profiling. “We want them to see to it that law agencies collect racial data. It’s good for the agencies, and it’s good for the public,” she said.

Grote said the study, entitled “Unequal Under the Law” and released Wednesday, was conducted in the first three months of 2007, using arrest data from sheriff’s and police departments from St. Tammany, Avoyelles, and DeSoto parishes. Legislators have not yet seen the report.

Using demographics of communities and parishes taken from the U.S. Census, the ACLU determined the rate at which people of color were arrested compared to whites.

“In every town, city and parish examined, people of color were arrested at a higher rate than their representation in the population,” the report said. 

The worst areas were Avoyelles Parish and the town of Bunkie, according to the study.

“In Bunkie, black people are 3.8 times as likely to get arrested as white people,” Grote said. 

In DeSoto Parish, black people in Mansfield were more than twice as likely to be arrested than white people, the report said. With blacks making up 66 percent of the population in the parish, they comprised 89 percent of the arrests, the report showed.

Blacks make up 42 percent of the population in the three parishes, and 53 percent of the arrests.

In St. Tammany Parish, only 31 percent of the population is black, but they are 2.3 times more likely to be arrested than whites, according to the study.

Grote said she met with St. Tammany sheriff’s officials to discuss the report. Chuck Hughes, attorney for the department, disputes the charge that deputies are using racial profiling.

“There are two types of arrests - discretionary and nondiscretionary, where the officer has no say about arresting the person,” Hughes said. “If you lump those two together, it will skew the statistics, but does it show racial profiling? I suggest it does not.”

St. Tammany Parish Sheriff Jack Strain has increased the number of black officers in his department from three, when he took over in 1996 to 60 now, Hughes noted.

Grote said the report had not yet been released to agencies in the other study parishes.

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