Connecticut Program to Reduce Racial Profiling Now a National Model

Connecticut’s quarter-century old law prohibiting racial profiling by police departments – which has been updated a few times over the years – has become a national model for other states to combat racial profiling in their own cities and towns.

As Hearst CT News reporter Bill Cummings wrote on Aug. 31, Northeastern University in Boston recently concluded that the Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project has become “a national leader” in its efforts to monitor and reduce potential racial profiling by officers conducting traffic stops, and the project is spreading its expertise nationwide.

Connecticut’s law is named for former state Sen. Alvin Penn, a Black legislator from Bridgeport, who, according to the blog Only in Bridgeport, was stopped and interrogated by a white police officer in 1996 as he drove through the neighboring town of Trumbull. Penn pushed back when the officer questioned his location.

“I asked why I was being stopped and why I needed to be aware of which town I was in. I wanted to know what difference that made,” Penn told a reporter in describing the situation. “He told me he didn’t have to give a reason for stopping me and said if I made an issue of it, he would give me a ticket for speeding.”

Three years later, in 1999, on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis, the General Assembly passed the Alvin W. Penn Racial Profiling Prohibition Act, which prohibited the stopping, detention, interdiction, or search of an individual by a police officer on the basis of their race, color, ethnicity, age, gender, or sexual orientation.

The problem was, police departments throughout Connecticut were not using a standardized traffic stop form, which made data collection and analysis nearly impossible.

So, in 2012, the Connecticut General Assembly – again on a nearly unanimous and bipartisan basis – established the Racial Profiling Prohibition Project Advisory Board for the purpose of advising the state’s non-partisan Office of Policy and Management on adopting standardized methods and guidelines to collect and report this information. The advisory board has been meeting since May 2012 on a monthly basis; all meetings are open to the public.

Since the law and its various amendments have taken effect, the frequency of Black and Hispanic drivers being stopped by police in Connecticut for no reason has decreased: “reductions in traffic stops involving minority drivers primarily result from fewer pretextual stops [85 %] for lighting violations and non-moving violations. We find relative declines of approximately 30% for stops resulting in a warning or an arrest,” Northeastern found.

That has elevated Connecticut’s program to a national model for police reform, Northeastern concluded. “The influence of the Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project has reached far beyond the state’s borders and has had a national impact on the conversation about police reform,” their study said.

Ken Barone, manager of the Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project and policy director for the Institute for Metropolitan and Regional Policy (a UConn research institute which staffs the Racial Profiling Prohibition Project), told Hearst CT Media that the group’s reach has grown, and that they are now working with California, Oregon, Colorado, Nevada, Rhode Island and Maine to develop and implement programs to reduce profiling by police in those states.

“We analyzed Rhode Island data between 2016 and 2019 and are in the process of analyzing 2020 to 2022,” Barone told Hearst CT Media. “We were also hired to evaluate the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C. More recently, we have been speaking with New Jersey, Maryland and Illinois about the evaluation of traffic stop records.”

Posted by Lawrence Cook