Department of Justice broadens ban on racial profiling

The Obama administration issued guidelines Monday that ban federal law enforcement from profiling on the basis of religion, national origin and other characteristics. The Justice Department hopes to serve as a model for local departments as the U.S. tackles questions about the role that race plays in policing.

The policy, which expands guidelines established under the Bush administration in 2003, also will require new training and data collection.

Civil rights advocates said they welcomed the broader protections but were disappointed that the guidelines will exempt security screening in airports and border checkpoints and won't be binding on local and state police agencies.

Though the guidelines -- five years in the making -- were not drafted in response to recent high-profile cases involving the deaths of black individuals at the hands of white police officers, they're nonetheless being released amid a national conversation about standards for police use of force, racial justice and the treatment of minorities by law enforcement.

"Particularly in light of certain recent incidents we've seen at the local level -- and the widespread concerns about trust in the criminal justice process which so many have raised throughout the nation -- it's imperative that we take every possible action to institute strong and sound policing practices," said Attorney General Eric Holder, referring to the August shooting by a white police officer of an unarmed black 18-year-old in Ferguson, Missouri, and the chokehold death weeks earlier of a man in New York City.

Local grand juries declined to indict either officer. The Justice Department is investigating both cases.

The guidelines cover federal agencies within the Justice Department, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. They also extend to local and state officers serving on joint task forces alongside federal agents.

Their practical impact remains to be seen, especially since local police officers are the ones primarily responsible for traffic stops, 911 calls and day-to-day interactions with the communities they patrol. But the Obama administration envisions the rules as a possible roadmap for local police. Holder is expected to brief local law enforcement officials on Monday to encourage them to adopt the federal guidelines.

Holder, who has made the release of the guidelines a priority before leaving the Justice Department next year, called the guidelines a "major and important step forward to ensure effective policing" by federal law enforcement.

The guidelines extend a ban on routine racial profiling that the Justice Department announced in 2003 under then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. Civil rights groups have long said those rules left open too many loopholes by allowing an exemption for national security and border investigations and by failing to extend the ban to characteristics beyond race and ethnicity.

The new guidelines would end the carve-out on national security and border investigations and widen the profiling ban to prohibit the practice on the basis of religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity -- though agents would still be able to consider those factors if they had information linking a person of that characteristic to a specific crime or threat.

Some advocacy groups for minority communities said the new guidelines do not go far enough. "You can't be against profiling in some contexts but for it in other contexts," said Rajdeep Singh, policy director of the Sikh Coalition.

The new protocols allow for significant exemptions, including for Homeland Security officials who screen passengers at airports and do inspections at the border. Homeland Security officials argued for the exemptions based on what they said was "the unique nature of border and transportation security as compared to traditional law enforcement."

The Associated Press