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FinalCall.com News
National News
Experts testify to racial, religious profiling
By Dina Rashed
Updated Nov 5, 2003 - 12:11:00 AM
CHICAGO (IPS/GIN)—Modeled after a congressional hearing, activists and experts spoke October 20 of racial profiling and discrimination against minorities and people of color, mainly African, Arab and South Asian and Latino Americans.
Timothy K. Lewis, former judge at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, presided over the hearing, while a number of commissioners listened to testimonies of the unequal treatment that challenges the communities on an almost daily basis.
"All testimonies will be put in a report for international distribution and we hope that the American Congress will also act on this issue of human rights," said Mr. Lewis.
"We are not against effective law enforcement, but we are against abuse of civil rights in the name of law enforcement," he said.
He also said that evidence is compiling that, on the contrary, these measures are working against law enforcement as communities are becoming more frightened and flow of information is drying up from the sources.
Drawing on his experience with the Muslim and Arab communities, Jim Fennerty of the National Lawyers Guild said they have been under attack every time they criticized the American foreign policy, and even more after 9/11.
"We are heading for a society where everything is based on secrecy," he said, referring to the measures of law enforcement officers in rounding up whom they consider suspects without properly notifying their family members about their charges or even their whereabouts.
Furthermore, this profiling has been extended from individuals to institutions and charities working with Muslims and Arabs, Mr. Fennerty said, asserting that such charities are suffering because people are afraid of donating lest they be labeled a terrorist.
Ali Khan, the executive director of the Chicago chapter of the American Muslim Council, gave a more personal account of ethnic and religious profiling in airports following September 11. He said that, like the Japanese Americans were rounded up during World War II, and the communists in the 1960s, now Muslims are suffering discriminatory policies.
He recalled his own experience in a Las Vegas airport, where he was not permitted aboard the plane and was interrogated in front of all other passengers because of his name, religion and ethnic background.
Latino communities, on the other hand, suffer other forms of profiling mainly associated with work and housing policies. Florentina Rendon, from the HOPE Fair Housing Center, explained that there are numerous raids that police officers mount on houses of the Latino community for suspicion of overcrowdings. In many cases, families are prohibited from using the rear doors of their homes, and accepting visitors, in order to control the human flow into the houses.
Emma Lozano of Centro sin Fronteras complained about the unfair employment policies that many Latinos face in the U.S., and said that the community is being taken advantage of because they offer cheap labor and get much fewer benefits than the average American worker.
African Americans still face police brutality, whether during raids for drugs by officers in many public housing units or within the police stations, said Lydia Taylor of the Justice Coalition of Greater Chicago.
She added that the war on drugs and gangs has been the excuse of law enforcement to terrorize the Black community, and that the city’s ban on racial profiling did not go beyond the rhetoric. "Racial profiling is an extension of slavery," she charged.
Such testimonies come in consistence with prior testimonies of communities’ members on Oct. 18, which brought over 150 community members and activists to listen to experiences of minorities who have been unjustly targeted.
The two hearings were organized by a number of Chicago-based and national organizations such as Amnesty International, Applied Research Center, Arab American Action Network, Coalition of African, Asian, European and Latino Immigrants of Illinois, Justice Coalition of Greater Chicago and Southwest Youth Collaboration.
