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Newsday - June 9, 2006
Bill would allow profiling in NY
(New York) State legislation proposed yesterday would allow law officers to consider race and ethnicity in identifying potential terrorism suspects - a move decried by a civil rights advocate.
The bill would allow "the use of race as one of many criteria in the war on terror," said Assemb. Dov Hikind (D-Brooklyn). "Suicide bombers and terrorists fit a very specific intelligence profile, and race and ethnicity is very much a part of that profile."
He noted that the 19 men who carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks all were Muslims from the Middle East or Asia. The terror suspects arrested in Canada last week had similar backgrounds, he noted.
"Let's get real. There is a terrorist profile," Hikind said.
He said police in New York and London already are using the kind of criteria contained in the bill.
Paul Browne, a spokesman for the New York Police Department, denied that city police use such tactics. The department "does not engage in profiling, but follows leads on criminal or terrorist activity to wherever they lead," he said.
The proposed legislation would authorize law enforcement officials to "consider race and ethnicity as one of many factors that could be used in identifying persons who can be initially stopped, questioned, frisked and/or searched."
The bill has the support of politicians from both sides of the aisle who joined Hikind for a rainy-day news conference on a Manhattan sidewalk. They included the main sponsor of the bill in the Senate, Serphin Maltese (R-Elmhurst), and Assemb. Vivian Cook (D-South Ozone Park).
The proposed bill drew the wrath of Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. "Racial and ethnic profiling has been shown time and time again to be not only anathema to principles of equality, but it's bad law enforcement," she said in a telephone interview….
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/state/ny-stterr094774564jun09,0,5486823,print.story?coll=ny-statenews-headlines
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