Tuesday, the ACLU released “The Persistence of Racial and Ethnic Profiling in the United States: A Follow-up Report to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination” documenting the pervasive problem of widespread racial profiling by federal, state, and local law enforcement agents as a result of Bush-era policies. The report, by the ACLU and the Rights Working Group, illustrates that government policies are a major cause of the disproportionate stopping and searching of racial minorities by law enforcement agencies and was submitted to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in response to a U.S. government submission. The report contains information from twenty two affiliates and several national projects highlighting racial profiling at the national, state, and local levels under a variety of federal programs and calls on Congress to pass the End Racial Profiling Act (ERPA), which would compel all law enforcement agencies to bar racial profiling, create and apply profiling procedures and document data on stop, search and arrest activities by race.

For additional information on human rights and racial discrimination, please visit the ACLU’s CERD webpage.