Blog of Rights
02/05/2013
Housing Discrimination

A Step Forward in Fair and Equal Access to Credit for Minority Borrowers

By Demelza Baer, Washington Legislative Office at 11:06am

During our nation's prolonged economic downturn, most of us have been impacted by foreclosures, unemployment, or a significant loss of savings. These hardships, however, haven't fallen equally across the backs of all Americans – minorities have borne a disproportionate share of the burden. Minority families are twice as likely to lose their home through foreclosure during the Great Recession. And, since these households relied on home equity for a greater proportion of their household wealth, the foreclosure crisis has substantially increased the wealth gap between whites and ethnic minorities. Discrimination, not neutral market forces, explains many of these disparities. Thus, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's (CFPB) recently issued Ability-to-Repay rule is a welcome first step towards protecting the civil rights of all Americans, so that every individual can achieve the American dream of homeownership on a fair and level playing field.

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12/13/2012
Racial Profiling

Wearing a Hoodie While Brown Does Not Mean You Are in a Gang

By Courtney Bowie, Racial Justice Program at 5:00pm

On December 16, 2010, West High School officials in Salt Lake City, Utah invited the Metro Gang Task Force into the school to conduct a gang sweep. Students identified, searched and interrogated by the police were mostly Latino/a or, in the case of Kaleb Winston, African-American.  He was targeted by his school and by the Task Force as a potential gang member, searched and accused of being a tagger. As an artist, Kaleb had a notebook full of drawings in a backpack manufactured to look like it had been spray-painted. But because graffiti is loosely defined, if at all, the police decided Kaleb was a “gang tagger” despite his denials. Kaleb was then forced to hold up a sign with the words “My name is Kaleb Winston and I am a gang tagger.” Law enforcement officers told him that this information was being placed into a database and that the information would be removed if he did not get into trouble for two years. Kaleb was emotionally devastated by the experience. He is not and has never been in a gang. Yet, his attendance at school that day, not bad behavior, made him the subject of intense police scrutiny and he now lives with the fear that the police view him as a suspect.

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09/04/2012
Access to Counsel

Hitting Two Birds with One Stone: Strategies for Addressing the Indigent Defense Crisis and Overincarceration

By Vanita Gupta, Center for Justice & Steve Hanlon, Partner, Holland & Knight at 1:07pm

Earlier this year, the Orleans Parish Defenders Office (OPD), which represents more than 80 percent of criminal defendants in Orleans Parish and handled 30,000 cases in 2011, faced a particularly severe fiscal crisis.

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08/06/2012
Racial Profiling

Waiting for the Court to Rule: What’s Next for Sheriff Arpaio?

By Cecillia Wang, ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project at 4:25pm

After seven days of trial testimony from both the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office and the Latino residents of the county who have suffered under a pattern and practice of racial profiling, the civil trial against Sheriff Joe Arpaio came to an end last week. The U.S. District Court will now decide whether Arpaio, the self-proclaimed toughest sheriff in America, has targeted Latinos for discriminatory traffic stops and illegal detentions.

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08/02/2012
Freedom of Expression

English as a First Language

By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 2:40pm

Sigh. As if we don’t have enough divisiveness in this country, a familiar subset of Congressional Republicans are trotting out yet another discriminatory bill papered over with hollow rhetoric about “unity,” “commonality” and shared national vision, which will be the subject of a hearing in the House Constitution Subcommittee today. (Here’s the ACLU’s statement, which focuses mainly on the civil rights and immigration issues in the bill; I’m just covering the First Amendment in this post.)

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07/13/2012
Stop-And-Frisk

NYC Officials Appear Driven to Defend Troubling Stop-and-Frisk Tactics

New York City’s leaders, most notably its billionaire mayor, are bent on supporting a stop-and-frisk policy that according to the police department’s own numbers overwhelmingly target minorities.

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06/27/2012
287(g)

Reading the Fine Print: DHS Has Not Ended 287(g) in Arizona

By Joanne Lin, Washington Legislative Office & Chris Rickerd, ACLU Washington Legislative Office & Charanya Krishnaswami, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 1:20pm

On Monday, the Supreme Court in Arizona v. United States struck down three provisions of Arizona’s S.B. 1070 racial profiling law, but reinstated, for now, the most controversial provision, which requires Arizona police officers to demand the immigration papers of anyone they stop, arrest, or detain. S.B. 1070 makes racial profiling Arizona state policy. When a police officer asks for papers, it’s based on bias because there is no way to tell by looking at or listening to someone whether the person is lawfully in the United States.

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06/14/2013
Drug Law Reform

The War on Marijuana Has a Latino Data Problem

By Lynda Garcia, Soros Fellow, Criminal Law Reform Project, ACLU at 11:49am

We know that the War on Marijuana unnecessarily drags hundreds of thousands of people into the criminal justice system every year for having marijuana. And, because of a new ACLU report, we know that it is Blacks who are disproportionately arrested– despite the fact that Blacks and whites use marijuana at comparable rates.

But something—or someone—is missing here: Latinos.

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06/13/2013
TSA

SPOT Off

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:58pm

Lost in all the news about the NSA program this week was the release of a devastating report by the DHS Inspector General on the TSA’s SPOT program (first reported by the New York Times on Sunday). The new report underscores what a waste of money that program has been. After hiring 2,800 full-time staff and spending an estimated $878 million since FY 2007, the program remains deeply misguided not only in its very concept, but also in how it has been implemented.

SPOT (which stands for Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques) is the program that places “Behavior Detection Officers” (BDOs) near airport security lines, where by intrusively chatting with fliers, they will supposedly be able to detect “something amiss” that might suggest a passenger is planning a terrorist attack.

The program has always been ludicrous. In testimony at a 2011 congressional hearing on SPOT, psychologist Dr. Maria Hartwig summarized the decades of empirical research on the detection of deception, which is basically

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06/06/2013
Drug Law Reform

End the Numbers Game: Police Should Not Be Rewarded for Making Marijuana Arrests

By Ezekiel Edwards, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project & Vanita Gupta, Center for Justice at 1:40pm

Every 37 seconds, another person is needlessly ensnared in the criminal justice system just for having marijuana...

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