A group of lawmakers is gearing up to back legislation to require police in Colorado to collect racial profiling data. It’s a good idea, but it should be limited in both scope and the time the mandate applies.

Collecting data to determine whether racial profiling is a problem would amount to yet another time-consuming mandate for police. As Denver Deputy Police Chief Matt Murray told The Denver Post’s Noelle Phillips, “Even if data collection takes 45 seconds. add that to all of the calls we get. Response times would go up.”

That’s why the mandate should be limited, say, to a couple of years, as it was when a similar bill passed the legislature in 2001. That bill was overly narrow, however, as it applied only to Denver and the State Patrol, when obviously there are other cities where similar concerns about profiling exist.

Why collect the data at all? Nick Mitchell, Denver’s independent monitor tasked with civilian oversight of police, provides the best answer. He says one of the complaints he heard most often when attending scores of community meetings last year — especially in west and east Denver — is that law enforcement decisions are being made on the basis of race or geography.

Mitchell’s point is not that ethnic profiling is in fact a big problem in Denver. He’s not a cop basher. His point is that the perception is widely shared in minority communities, and there is no way to answer, let alone rebut, it without actual data.

Are black and Hispanic motorists more likely to be searched than whites after a stop? If so, is contraband turning up to justify those searches?

Mitchell supports having police fill out contact cards that would provide information such as the race and gender of the person stopped, duration of the stop, whether there was a search and what was found. And as Phillips reports, a bipartisan committee of lawmakers is studying the possibility of other categories, too.

The two-year collection of police contact data a decade ago in Denver did not reveal any stunning disparities, but some differences surfaced. According to two University of Colorado analysts, for example, blacks, whites and Hispanics “were searched generally at the same rates” in pedestrian stops, but blacks and Hispanics were somewhat more likely to be searched after traffic stops — even though “contraband seized for Hispanics was consistently lower” than for other groups.

Do such differences persist? If so, are there defensible reasons for them? It’s time to update the data and find out.

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