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(Washington DC) July 20, 2010 - Last week, Congressman John Conyers (D-MI), Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), and nearly 60 Congressional co-sponsors introduced landmark federal legislation aimed at eliminating racial and religious profiling. This legislation is known as the End Racial Profiling Act of 2010 (ERPA).
The Coalition fully supports ERPA and calls for its passage by the United States Congress.
Why is ERPA important to Sikhs?
In the post-9/11 environment, Sikhs have been subjected to arbitrary detention, searches, and stops by law enforcement officials on the basis of actual (or perceived) race, religion, ethnicity, and national origin. In the airport context, the Coalition has found that, Sikhs are secondarily screened 100% of the time at some airports around the nation.
Apart from undermining civil rights, these practices divert scarce resources away from legitimate law enforcement activity, which instead should be aimed at investigating actual criminal activity. In other words, wearing a turban, keeping a beard, or having dark skin should not in of itself invite extra scrutiny from law enforcement officials.
ERPA will work to end unfair scrutiny of Sikhs and others by:
- Establishing a prohibition on racial profiling, enforceable by declaratory or injunctive relief.
- Mandating the collection of data on both routine and spontaneous investigatory activities, as a condition of receiving Federal law enforcement funding;
- Authorizing the Justice Department to provide grants for the development and implementation of best policing practices that discourage profiling; and
- Requiring the Attorney General to provide periodic reports to assess the nature of any ongoing discriminatory profiling practices.
Click here to watch the Sikh Coalition testify in front of a Congressional subcommittee at a hearing last month about the harmful effects of racial profiling at our nation's airports.
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