Jerry Brown Signs New Racial Profiling Legislation

This new legislation not only burdens the tax payers with a cost of $9 million, it’s created more paperwork for police officers, making them spend less time policing and more time filling out papers.

It also mandates that the attorney general create an advisory board with the goal of eliminating identity profiling, as well as improving diversity and racial sensitivity among law enforcement.

For activists, particularly those who support the Black Lives Matter movement, this law is a big step forward in the fight for equal police treatment of minorities. The recent string of unarmed black men being killed during encounters with law enforcement has renewed discussion of systemic bias.

For many of the police themselves, however, this measure will create a burden that will make policing less efficient without actually answering questions about race and law enforcement.

“We have contact with the public all the time that requires no documentation, no paperwork,” said Lt. Steve James, president of the Long Beach Police Officers Association, according to the Los Angeles Times. “Now, the amount of time we have to spend doing documentation and paperwork has gone up. The time doing menial tasks has gone up.”

It could take as much as 15 minutes to  half an hour for officers to log such information for every stop, adding up to “a ton of police time lost,” James said.

It was for these reasons that enforcement organizations like the Fraternal Order of Police had asked Governor Brown to veto the bill, AB 953. They worried about the amount of time cut from actual community policing.

This comes at a time when police all over the country are under scrutiny for alleged “racism”. They already have to wear body cameras, and now this. Pretty soon they’ll stop arresting African Americans altogether because of what a hassle it is. If one positive thing can be taken from this, at least now there will be hard evidence to show that not all cops are racist.

Source: rt.com