Alabama House of Representatives rejects racial profiling bill

A bill that would ban racial profiling and require the collection of data on traffic stops failed a procedural motion in the Alabama House of Representatives on Thursday night.

The legislation, sponsored by Sen. Rodger Smitherman, D-Birmingham, lost on a budget isolation resolution — a necessary step for a bill to advance to the floor for a vote — on a 34 to 52 vote.

“I guess we are sending a message that ‘Bama is still backwards,” Rep. Merika Coleman, D-Pleasant Grove, who handled the bill in the House, said after the vote.

The vote came right after the House voted overwhelmingly to declare Dec. 1 Rosa Parks Day in Alabama. Twenty-nine Democrats and five Republicans voted to advance the racial profiling bill. Forty-nine Republicans and three Democrats voted against it. Four Republicans abstained; 12 members were listed as not voting.

The Montgomery delegation split down partisan lines. Democratic Reps. Alvin Holmes, John Knight and Thad McClammy of Montgomery and Kelvin Lawrence of Hayneville voted to advance the measure. Republicans Reed Ingram of Pike Road; Dimitri Polizos of Montgomery and Chris Sells of Greenville voted against it.

Smitherman’s bill would forbid traffic stops based on racial profiling and required local police departments to develop policies against it. The bill would also have required the collection of data on those stopped.

The legislation did not lay out specific punishments for those found to racially profile individuals. In the original version of the bill, the attorney general’s office would have the power to withhold funding from departments that did not develop policies.

Supporters of the bill said it would allow officials to get a sense of the extent of racial profiling and clear suspicion from honest law enforcement officers. Rep. Allen Farley, R-McCalla, a retired police officer, said that law enforcement officers who engage in racial profiling “need to have their butts run off” from law enforcement.

“I’m standing up for the good officers, which are 99.9 percent of the men and women in the blue and brown ... something like this would allow these good officers to say ‘hey, look at my record, look at my numbers,” he said. “’I’m not one of those guys you’re talking about.’”

Coleman said there was a lack of data to make the extent of the problem known.

“What we want to do in Alabama is send a message,” she said. “We’ve seen this stuff nationally. We have to do something to determine who the bad actors are in Alabama.”

Other legislators had concerns. Rep. Connie Rowe, R-Jasper, a retired police chief, said racial profiling was a problem. But she said that in rural police departments, some officers get assigned to areas where people of one race predominate, and expressed concerns that officer might be unfairly suspected of profiling based on data.

“I wouldn’t want that young fellow who got a job, for their career to be damaged,” she said.

House Speaker Mac McCutcheon, R-Monrovia, a retired law enforcement officer who voted against the BIR (Budget Isolation Resolution), said the vote was not "a statement that we should in no way address the issue. We do need to address the issue."

McCutcheon said he wanted to see more information drawn from complaints against individual officers and accounting for the demographics of an area an officer works.

"Other things need to be added into the date to determine if there is a bad officer out there trying to do racial profiling," he said.

The House vote triggered a filibuster on the following bill — a hunting measure — which was the last bill scheduled for the evening. Rep. Napoleon Bracy, D-Prichard, noted that the House voted for a bill honoring Rosa Parks before voting down the racial profiling bill.

“The things that are important to us — it just doesn’t matter in this body,” he said. “We continue to get run over as if we don’t have a right to go back home to tell the people we represent to tell them we did this, and it’s important, and it will make a difference.”

The chamber adjourned late Thursday for lack of a quorum. Coleman and McCutcheon said they would meet with Smitherman and members of the Legislature with law enforcement experience Tuesday to consider amendments that might get the bill to final passage.

There was no certainty that the bill would return. Coleman said she trusted that the discussions Tuesday would take place, but also warned the filibuster could continue.

"We passed that Ten Commandments bill tonight that does absolute nothing," she said. "For the betterment of the people of Alabama, it does absolutely nothing ... but we have people who are hurting. We have people in our districts who are asking 'You're our representative. Can you do something?'"