California police officials: New racial profiling law is 'terrible'

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This weekend, California Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation that would require reports, to be made public, on the racial makeup of all police encounters. While this legislation is seen by civil rights groups as a step toward transparency, many police officials hate the idea.

“It’s a terrible piece of legislation,” said Lt. Steve James, president of the Long Beach Police Officers Assn. and the national trustee for the California Fraternal Order of Police, reports the LA Times.

James went on to say that part of the problem with the legislation was that the reporting process could become cumbersome.

“We have contact with the public all the time that requires no documentation, no paperwork,” he said. “Now, the amount of time we have to spend doing documentation and paperwork has gone up. The time doing menial tasks has gone up.”

What’s more, James said, the problem doesn’t exist.

“There is no racial profiling. There just isn’t,” he said. “There is criminal profiling that exists.”

It’s just that kind of attitude that supporters of the legislation are looking to stamp out, and they hope that this new method of accountability will, if nothing else, prove that there is, in fact, a problem.

“All I can say: Thank God this bill got signed and we’ll be able to look at the data and see what’s really going on,” Rosa Aqeel, the legislative director of PICO California, a faith-based advocacy group, told the LA Times. “We should all want to see the data so we can see how pervasive the problem is.”