Last week here on RI Future, I shared a short podcast about Racial Profiling in RI from the perspective of youth and community organizers working with Providence Youth Student Movement. Here is an extended series of excerpts from my conversation on Sonic Watermelons with Sangress Xiong and Yonara Alvarado, and Franny Choi.
Xiong, Alvarado, and Choi are among community members, law enforcement officials and members of the legislature who will gather today at the State House for a meeting of the House Committee on Judiciary; the Comprehensive Racial Profiling Prevention Act of 2012 (H-7256) is one of the bills to be discussed.
All of tonight’s agenda items deal with “Motor and Other Vehicles,” and most are about motorists driving under the influence. A couple other bills that might be of interest to RI Future readers include H-7222, which “would authorize a bail commissioner to order that a person’s license be suspended immediately upon the report of a law enforcement officer that the person has refused a chemical test for driving while under the influence of alcohol” and H-7203 which, if passed, would ”bar checkpoints as a means to detect motorists under the influence.”
For more information about today’s hearing, click here. To read more about my interview with Xiong, Alvarado, and Choi, click here.
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Hear Sonic Watermelons live every Wednesday
6-8 PM (EST) on www.bsrlive.com.
I’d humbly suggest that the way to attack this problem is to go for the money.
Let’s see an analysis of how much money is spent in this state for traffic enforcement across over 40 police departments and 5 courthouses.
Then let’s see how much money is spent on law enforcement for predatory lending, banking regulation, debt collectors, etc.
This state is obsessed with traffic violations and is losing sight that law enforcement has forgotten to protect us.
I agree with your point about police officers being turned into highway tax collectors with guns, which has had a hugely detrimental effect on the relationship between police and the public, but unfortunately, the numbers you are after are impossible to accurately measure. Or more accurately, what you would be getting is whatever presentation of statistics based on arbitrary classifications the police decided to publish.
We have got to start making this point clearly somehow. The Rhode Island Justice System does almost nothing to protect Rhode Island consumers. Instead, they mortgaged our kid’s future to build more and more and more traffic regulations and more cops, and more fines on top of all that (to pay for the cops).
It’s true that the police cannot be trusted to report on their own activities, since it is downright scandalous.
But I think we’re wasting our time looking for a fair shake against profiling. The cops are on a mission to harass everyone (not just minorities) because it drives up their quotas and justifies their job in increasingly lean budget times.
This isn’t about discrimination; it’s all about the money.