Steven Holt: “The purpose of this amendment is simple: to prohibit any Federal funds from flowing to law enforcement organizations…”

“The purpose of this amendment is simple: to prohibit any Federal funds from flowing to law enforcement organizations that engage in any form of racial, ethnic, or religious profiling. It's been a matter of concern for decades among minority communities when policing organizations engage in profiling, but recent events have brought the problem into sharp focus. {time} 2040 Starting last August, the Associated Press published a series of disturbing stories about the systematic racial, ethnic, and religious profiling conducted by the New York City Police Department against Muslim and Arab Americans in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Louisiana. In September of last year, I asked the Department of Justice to investigate what we now know was a pattern of surveillance and infiltration by the New York Police Department against innocent American Muslims in the absence of a valid investigative reason. These Muslim communities were mapped, infiltrated, and surveilled simply because they were Muslim. Profiling is wrong. Profiling on the basis of the race, ethnicity, and religion is a violation of core constitutional principles. Profiling is also wrong because it is not good policing. Profiling is an unthinking, lazy, unprofessional approach to police work and intelligence work, and it only raises the risk that the real plot will slip through the cracks. Indeed, profiling is counterproductive.…”