Testimony on H-5263, a bill to curtail racial profiling
Greetings and thank you for this opportunity to speak to you. My name is Martha Yager. I work for the American Friends Service Committee, South East New England office, a Quaker-based organization which works throughout Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts.
Tonight we have heard from the various police units opposing this bill. And we have heard powerful testimony from people in the community about why we need the bill.
I want to step back for a moment to think about the purpose of laws. Laws are created to, at least in part, help us act as our better selves. For instance we may have opposed individual violent revenge in response to crime, but when our loved one is murdered or harmed, it is only natural that the hurt and rage flames into an impulse to want to kill the person who killed our loved one. The purpose of the law is to relieve the victim’s family of having to deal with that. It says we as a community also believe that murder is wrong and we will create a judicial system that can hold people accountable for the harms they do and to protect society from any further harm. It says that we understand your rage but you may not act on it and will act on your behalf. In so doing it helps the victims family live the values they hold dear in a time of deep distress or, as a friend of mine whose dad was murdered right in front of him, to be their better selves.
Likewise we have decided together that racism and discrimination are not how we want to live as a society. Yet we have a long history of racism in this country and it takes a long time to unlearn those attitudes and change our ways. We also know that in spite of our best intentions, because we have grown up steeped in those ways, we sometimes will act in ways that discriminate or are hurtful. We need laws and structures to hold us accountable to learning to behave differently, to help us become the community we want to be.
As I sat in the meeting with the police last week, listening to their justifications for why we don’t need this bill, and listening to the community explain the reality of racial profiling in our community, I realized that ultimately we all wanted the same thing. We all want a safe community. And we all know that there are people who cause harm who need to be stopped. But the police, for a variety of reasons, choose a very narrow approach to creating safety that looks with suspicion and assumption of wrongdoing at everyone they encounter and that that lens is certainly shaped by the long history of racism even when they don’t want it to be. And we have to acknowledge that there are some in the police community who are less committed to undoing racism and some who, for a variety of reasons, abuse their power and become accustomed to behaving in very intimidating ways. The community experiences their efforts as being counterproductive and indeed creating less safety because of the experience of the rage that results from humiliation and the resultant lack of trust that is necessary for good policing. The community is less safe when people are afraid to go to the police with concerns or fear they wont be taken seriously and the police themselves are less safe when people are enraged at how they have been treated.
This bill, which curtails only some aspects of racial profiling, which has been significantly modified to meet the concerns of the police, and which some police find acceptable, is a tool to help us move toward having the safe community that we all say we want. As one of the police pointed out the other day, it only holds them accountable to standards they already endorse, to their best practices. The community needs the legislature to finally pass this legislation to help hold us all to some basic standards, to help move us to being a more just and safe community for all of us.
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