Do not make the mistake of thinking that because my conclusion is the same as another person's that my reasoning is the same
Police balk at new study of profiling
State seeks more data on traffic stops
By Brett McNeil
Tribune staff reporter
January 4, 2004
Though police departments across Illinois launched a state-mandated racial profiling study on New Year's Day, many law-enforcement officials remain unclear about its scope and their legal obligations to collect data under the new law.
Police officers performing traffic stops anywhere in Illinois now must record the name, address, sex and race of the driver--whether they issue a ticket or not.
This data and other information will be sent to the Illinois Department of Transportation for a four-year study that lawmakers believe will determine whether police engage in racial profiling--targeting people because of their perceived race or ethnicity when making traffic stops.
But even as departments geared up for the study, police criticized IDOT's handling of it as confusing and cumbersome. And rather than adopting IDOT's longer "stop sheet" questionnaire, some departments are choosing to meet only the letter of the law by gathering limited data.
"We will comply with the law, and we're trying to do it in the least bureaucratic way possible. But, quite frankly, it has been very difficult," said Naperville Police Chief David Dial.
Posted by P6 at January 5, 2004 05:50 AM | Trackback URL: http://www.prometheus6.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2739I kept reading that acronym as IDIOT.
I expect the law to be subject to rampant and extensive gaming. What are they going to do, send the cops out to ticket the cops who aren't making records of the people they don't ticket?
I expect the law to be subject to rampant and extensive gaming. What are they going to do, send the cops out to ticket the cops who aren't making records of the people they don't ticket?
Expecting people to report their own wrongdoing is, shal we say, a problematic concept.
It's deeper than that. The Thin Blue Line is very real, and the police culture is heavily weighted to the "We Know Better Than You" and "We Can Do No Wrong" attitudes. Hell, we've been sending poor Mexicans to prison here in Dallas with sheetrock and pool chalk. If we can have a widespread conspiracy to actually -- with malice -- set a large group of people up for felonys to serve long sentences in Texas prisons, do we really expect them to fill out a dinky form and rat on themselves?
Expecting people to report their own wrongdoing is, shal we say, a problematic concept.
Hence the problem with industries self-regulating themselves, a popular one with the Bush Administration.