Racial Profiling by Police Departments

Recent months have witnessed an increased level of distress by minority communities throughout the country and people of many backgrounds concerned about human rights, over the practice of racial profiling by police departments or other agencies. This practice continues to victimize many innocent people, making our neighbors of color often feel like strangers in their own land. The Jewish Council for Public Affairs has conducted programming on this issue, hearing directly of the great pain this practice has caused. The Jewish community fully understands from its own history the destructiveness of being marked for disparate treatment and hostility.

The organized Jewish community, through this resolution, registers its unequivocal opposition to the practice of racial profiling as detrimental to democracy. We call upon all communities and law enforcement agencies to combat this practice. Our community supports measures which will work toward stopping racial profiling and making police agencies more fair and effective. The measures include: 

1. more vigorous efforts to recruit, hire, retain and promote minority group members as police officers; 
2. making offending officers and supervising officials more accountable;
3. requiring law enforcement agencies to compile and publish statistics which would uncover racial profiling; 
4. increasing community relations efforts and cooperation between people of all backgrounds and police departments, so that all sides may gain a better understanding of minority sensitivities as well as the very difficult and dangerous job police officers are required to do; and 
5. support initiatives that provide and encourage continuing education at all levels for officers.