A bill to end racial profiling has been languishing in Congress for 6 months now.
Twenty-one years ago yesterday, the United States finally ratified an international human rights treaty — the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) — which, as the name suggests, aims to eradicate discrimination based on race in a number of areas like the workplace, in housing, and within a patchwork of election laws that makes voting much harder in some states.
And then there’s our broken criminal justice system, which disproportionately touches the lives of African Americans and Latinos. One way Congress could help is to pass a law that targets discriminatory profiling by law enforcement, often based on race and ethnicity— a practice cited frequently over the past year or so with an increased national focus on police officer interactions with communities of color.
Six months ago today, Sen. Ben Cardin, D. Md., and Rep. John Conyers, D. Mich., reintroduced a bill that would help, if only more members of Congress would support it.
That bill — the End Racial Profiling Act (ERPA) — would prohibit profiling by federal, state, local, and Indian tribal law enforcement authorities on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation. This version of ERPA mirrors the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) expansion of what discriminatory profiling in America actually looks like by including additional identity categories that weren’t in previous versions of the bill.
That DOJ expansion came in the form of updates to racial profiling guidance first released in June 2003 under President George W. Bush. And while the updates contained troubling exceptions and loopholes, civil rights groups did applaud then-Attorney General Eric Holder for making some progress.
Today, Black Lives Matter activists include ERPA as a recommendation in their Campaign Zero federal policy agenda. Bernie Sanders, Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. senator from Vermont, cosponsored ERPA the day after he met with Black Lives Matter activists last month, and Hillary Clinton cosponsored versions of the bill in 2001 and 2004 as a senator — and has delivered powerful speeches this year about reforming the criminal justice system.
ERPA in 2015 certainly has more cosponsors than when Clinton was in the Senate — but not by much. Only 22 senators have signed on in the past six months. In the House, Conyers’ bill has 97 cosponsors. Neither has Republican support. While some in Congress continue to ignore the reality of persistent racial discrimination — as they do on voting rights, for example — recent bipartisan momentum in some areas of criminal justice reform should include support of legislation to help combat discriminatory profiling. Supporting ERPA would be a good place to start.








