Racial Profiling in Los Angeles

In August 2008, the ACLU of Southern California released an analysis, prepared by economist and Yale University Professor Ian Ayres, of the data collected through the federal consent decree over the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Prof. Ayres found statistically significant disparities in the rates at which Blacks and Latinos in Los Angeles were stopped, frisked, searched and arrested, and found that these disparities were not justified by local crime rates or by any other legitimate policing rationale evident from LAPD’s extensive data. The ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project is currently working with the law firm of Morrison & Foerster LLP to terminate immigration removal proceedings for twenty-five Latino workers who were arrested, in violation of their constitutional rights, during a raid at eleven El Balazo taqueria throughout the San Francisco Bay area. All of the locations were raided on the same day, and the workers argue that ICE officers did not have individualized reasonable suspicion to arrest all of the workers and therefore violated their rights under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Workers and advocates believe that the workers were targeted because of their race and/or ethnic appearance. Also in 2009, the ACLU of Southern California settled racial profiling claims against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department on behalf of nineteen Black and Latino men who were detained on their community college campus and humiliated in front of their professors and peers. The young men were held for longer than one hour in an ostensible drug sting that yielded no evidence of drug activity. The settlement provided for a strengthened definition of racial profiling for the LA County Sheriff ’s department and a retraining for sheriffs involved in campus patrols.