News & Commentary

Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee signed a law legalizing marriage for same-sex couples today. Chafee signed the bill shortly after its passage by the state legislature.

In striking down three of the four challenged provisions in Arizona’s anti-immigrant law, today’s Supreme Court decision sends an important message that states wanting to act as immigration enforcement officers face severe constitutional obstacles in doing so. For those of us concerned about racial profiling in the state, the decision provides further reason to enact strong legislation to keep local police out of the immigration business.

Seven organizations today sent a letter to Providence Commissioner of Public Safety Steven Pare, criticizing the city police department’s plans to engage in an aggressive “stop and frisk” program in response to a recent spate of gun violence in the city. Deploring the racial profiling inherent in such police practices, the groups’ letter stated: “Stepping up the humiliating and dehumanizing questioning and frisking of our minority youth without cause is a simplistic approach to a complex problem and one that we believe will do more harm than good.”

The Rhode Island ACLU, in conjunction with its counterpart in Maine, today appealed the FBI’s refusal to release virtually any information that might indicate to what extent a federal program that allows for ethnic and racial mapping of local communities may be resulting in racial profiling in the two states. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed almost two years ago to learn about the controversial program, the two ACLU Affiliates received mostly blank pages from the FBI, including a censored census map of New England, leading to today’s appeal. According to a 2008 FBI operations guide, FBI agents have the authority to collect information about and map so-called “ethnic-oriented” businesses, behaviors, lifestyle characteristics and cultural traditions in communities with concentrated ethnic populations in order to assist the FBI’s “domain awareness” and “intelligence analysis” activities. The FOIA request was designed to find out how this mapping was taking place in Rhode Island. However, the very little information disclosed raises more questions than answers. For instance, one partially released document shows the FBI is using 2000 census data to track “foreign born” and “mixed ancestry” populations of some type in Rhode Island. It raises concerns that the FBI is profiling immigrant communities, but the FBI failed to provide any more information or indicate which populations it is tracking or why. Without this information, it is impossible to know whether the FBI is using its authority appropriately and constitutionally. This concern is not merely speculative. FBI documents obtained from other ACLU affiliates strongly suggest that the FBI is, in fact, profiling communities for suspicionless investigations on the basis of crude stereotypes. For example, a 2009 memorandum shows that the Detroit FBI sought to collect information about Middle-Eastern and Muslim communities in Michigan without any evidence of wrongdoing. And after noting that San Francisco “is home to … one of the largest ethnic Chinese populations outside mainland China,” two FBI memoranda from that city justified the opening of an investigation involving racial and national origin mapping because “[w]ithin this community there has been organized crime for generations.”                RI ACLU executive director Steven Brown said today: “It is essential to learn how, and to what extent, the FBI has been using this troubling authority here in Rhode Island. The FBI should be tracking true threats, not targeting entire communities based on race or ethnicity. If the businesses or lifestyles of Muslim or other local communities in the state are being racially profiled, at a minimum they have a right to know about it. Unfortunately, we know as little now as we did two years ago when we filed this request. This denial of the public’s right to know is completely unacceptable.” ACLU of Maine Executive Director Shenna Bellows added, “As our nation's leading law enforcement agency, the FBI should not be wasting resources by inappropriately mapping our communities on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion. Law enforcement programs based on evidence and facts are more effective than a system based on racial stereotypes or mass suspicion.”

Although a new redistricting plan for the state House and Senate was signed into law two weeks ago, the public remains in the dark as to whether the lines that were drawn ensure fair representation for racial minorities. That is the gist of a detailed four-page letter sent by six community organizations to the state’s redistricting consultant, Kimball Brace, seeking an explanation for his failure to use or release any racial bloc voting analysis despite being required to do so under his contract with the state.

The Rhode Island ACLU, along with nine other organizations, submitted written testimony today to the Secretary of State’s Office, urging significant revisions to proposed rules dealing with procedures for the issuance of voter ID cards to people who do not have the requisite photo identification required to vote on Election Day under a new state law.  The testimony pointed out that the proposed rules do not adequately address the specific needs of some of the groups that will be most in need of voter ID cards, including the elderly, people with disabilities, the poor and the transient.

Claiming that it violates the Department of Justice’s own standards, the RI ACLU and four other organizations have asked the United States Solicitor General to “halt any further efforts” by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Rhode Island to seek to impose the death penalty on Jason Wayne Pleau. The letter follows actions by that office to appeal a federal court ruling two weeks ago that Governor Lincoln Chafee acted lawfully in refusing to transfer Pleau’s custody to the federal government, which is seeking to prosecute him even though he has already agreed to serve a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Rhode Island ACLU executive director Steven Brown issued the following statement today in response to Governor Lincoln Chafee’s signing into law a bill requiring voters to present photo identification in order to vote at the polls:

The Coalition Against Racial Profiling has called upon the Rhode Island Police Chiefs Association to provide a public accounting of their withdrawal of support for the Comprehensive Racial Profiling Prevention Act. The Coalition said such an accounting was necessary to follow up on a legislative committee chair’s call for further negotiations between the police chiefs and the community to reach agreement on a revised bill.