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State Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, chair of a police profiling task force, presented proposed legislation at a news conference in Salem on Wednesday. (Dave Killen, staff)

(Dave Killen/Staff)

Police throughout Oregon would be required to collect data on officer-initiated pedestrian and traffic stops as part of proposed legislation to thwart racial or other bias-based profiling, state Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum said Wednesday.

Published data would improve police accountability and address evidence of bias, Rosenblum said in a news conference in Salem, where she introduced draft legislation for the upcoming 2017 session. The proposal also would expand officer education and training to include profiling prevention, and understanding and overcoming implicit bias.

The legislation, if enacted, would "ensure that all law enforcement officers receive appropriate training, and not just new recruits," said Rosenblum, chairwoman of the Law Enforcement Profiling Task Force, which started meeting 18 months ago. "Law enforcement officers should be required to recertify these skills as part of their continuing training requirements, and demonstrate competency in profiling prevention throughout their careers."

The draft legislation - labeled, for now, Legislative Concept 420 -- also says Oregon's drug sentencing laws need to be reformed. Task force members, including law enforcement, the ACLU of Oregon, and defense attorneys, are expected to explore expanding the proposal to possibly minimize consequences for noncriminal drug users.

The cost of the programs Rosenblum outlined would be $4 million every two years, she said.

"Yes, it does have a price tag," she said, "as most important things like this do."

Filling out the form should take an officer about a minute, said Marion County Sheriff Jason Myers, a task force member who attended the news conference.

The legislation calls for the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission to develop, by July 2018, and start a standardized method for officers to record data. That data would include the date and time of an officer-initiated pedestrian or traffic stop; the location; the race, ethnicity, age and sex of the subject; the nature of the stop; and the outcome of the stop.

The commission would review the data annually and report to the Department of Public Safety Standards and Training, governor and legislative committees. The department would offer advice and technical assistance to agencies named in the report.

Police agencies with 100 or more officers would start recording the data no later than July 2018; agencies with 25 to 99 officers would start no later than July 2019; agencies with 24 or fewer would start no later than July 2020. The agencies would report their data to the Justice Commission a year after collection.

"This is not an inner city issue," task force member Kayse Jama, who is executive director of Unite Oregon, said at the news conference. "This is a statewide issue and we should address it as a statewide issue."

The proposed legislation requires agencies to have policies that prohibit racial profiling with time frames on investigating and reporting back to the person who filed a complaint.

The data would not include the identity of the person stopped or the officer.

The task force's work follows up on Gov. Kate Brown signing of a bill in July 2015 that explicitly prohibits profiling by police, making Oregon the 31st state in the nation to do so.

The law defines profiling as law enforcement targeting a person based solely on age, race, ethnicity, color, national origin, language, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, political affiliation, religion, homelessness or disability.

Since 2001, only five Oregon police agencies -- Beaverton, Corvallis, Eugene, Hillsboro and Oregon State Police -- have voluntarily provided the data to the state. But the information they collect and how they obtain it are inconsistent, the task force report found.

"This is an issue we've looked at for quite a long time," Myers said in the news conference, when asked to explain why racial profiling exists. "Everyone in this room has an implicit bias. Officers must recognize (racial bias) and not have that overshadow the encounter the law enforcement officer is having with the community."

--Allan Brettman

503-294-5900

@allanbrettman