Moratorium on Consent Searches Won In Response to Racial Profiling Complaints

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On Monday, the Fayetteville City Council voted to impose a four-month moratorium on consent searches. The 120-day moratorium, which will begin Feb. 1, is a response to complaints of racial profiling and pressure from civil rights groups. 

During the four-month moratorium, an independent review will be conducted of the department's practices and procedures, NBC17 reported.

Also, The Fayetteville Observer reported that police in Fayetteville received 40 complaints of biased policing since 2007. In 2011, the department received 19 complaints of racial profiling -- all were from African Americans except one. None of the bias complaints were determined to have merit.

A few weeks ago when the city council informally voted 9-1 to support a moratorium, Fayetteville Police Chief Tom Bergamine an ardent defender of consent searches said that vote reaffirmed his decision, announced last weekend, to retire.

Consent searches occur when police ask motorists pulled over for traffic infractions if they can search their vehicle, and motorists grant them permission. Although it’s not clear that officers inform motorists that they have the right to refuse these searches.

It has been well established that consent searches, which do not require a warrant or probable cause that a crime has been committed, create opportunities for officers to make racially biased judgments about which vehicle to search. And people of color have been shown to be disproportionately subjected to consent searches, leading to a disproportionate number being arrested and serving prison time, when contraband is found.

In 1999, an ACLU class action lawsuit filed against California Highway Patrol in 1999 revealed that black and Latino motorists were 2-3 times more likely to be stopped and searched as whites, according to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

Following the lawsuit, CHP entered into a consent decree that required a three-year moratorium on consent searches and data collection.

In California as in Fayetteville, only a small percentage of motorists were found to have drugs yet thousands suffered the humiliation and invasiveness of a discriminatory search.

In Fayetteville, police statistics from the past few years show that some 75 percent of all drivers who are searched are black, which is highly disproportionate to their numbers in the city. Fayetteville’s black residents comprise less than half the city’s population but 58 percent of those that are stopped are black. And police need no more reason than their own suspicion to request a search.

This vote for a moratorium follows pressure from The Fayetteville Area Minority Lawyers Association and the local NAACP that have been fighting to get racial profiling addressed in that city.

--By Keith Rushing