October 01, 2009
African-American motorists are three to four times more likely to be stopped by police on Maryland roads than other drivers, yet they are no more likely to be carrying drugs or contraband. That suggests a pattern of illegal racial profiling, and in 1998 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Maryland State Police to stop the practice. The case was settled by a federal consent decree in 2003 after Maryland agreed to change some procedures and investigate drivers' complaints of racial profiling.
But since then, little has changed. Between 2003 and last year, for example, 70 percent of the drivers stopped and searched on Maryland roads were minorities; over the same period, black motorists filed at least 100 complaints of discrimination. Yet incredibly, not one of those complaints was found to be credible by state police internal investigators. For all the NAACP and ACLU know, nothing was ever done to address the issue. As an attorney for the NAACP put it, the state could have thrown the complaints in a wastebasket and no one would be the wiser.
That's because the records of the internal police investigations into complaints against individual officers are considered confidential personnel records that are exempt from public scrutiny. The state argues that they don't fall under the scope of Maryland's public information act and therefore can be withheld from ACLU and NAACP attorneys seeking to determine whether police are living up to the 2003 consent decree. In effect, the state is saying the public should just take its word that all the 100 or so complaints of racial profiling filed by black motorists over the last five years were completely unfounded.
That's hard to believe given the vastly disproportionate number of African-Americans who are stopped and searched - three or four hundred for every 100 white drivers in a state where white drivers greatly outnumber black motorists. Even if the police were trying to clean up their act, there's no way for the public to know for certain whether racial profiling was still a factor in traffic stops unless the results of their investigations into motorists' complaints can be reviewed by some outside party. Due to the long-running nature of the dispute, this is not a case where state police can be relied on to police themselves.
In 2007, a Baltimore County circuit judge ruled that the records should be released with the names and other identifying information of the officers involved blacked out. That seemed like an eminently sensible balance between the officers' right to privacy and the public's right to verify the department's claims.
The state appealed that decision, however, and the matter is now before Maryland's second-highest court, the Court of Special Appeals. On Monday the full court convened to hear arguments in the case - an unusual occurrence that happens only about once a year and that often signals that the court is likely to issue a decision that can be cited as precedent. We hope that after considering the evidence of a continuing pattern of racial profiling targeting African-American drivers, the judges will uphold the prudent compromise crafted by the lower court.
