"Face the Truth: Racial Profiling Across America” is a powerful documentary produced by Breakthrough and the Rights Working Group featuring stories of individuals affected by racial profiling and educational interviews with notable law enforcement and civil society leaders. The video released alongside the Rights Working Group report “Faces of Racial Profiling: A Report from Communities Across America” underscores the need to stop racial profiling by federal, state and local law enforcement.
RWG staff and members speak about the growing connections between surveillance, national security, immigration enforcement, privacy, and civil liberties in this new video from 20KFilms, created for the American Library Association Office of Intellectual Freedom (ALA-OIF) Privacy Revolution campaign and Choose Privacy Week in May 2012. The ALA explains: “The featured speakers ask important questions about the impact of the growing surveillance state on national security, civil liberties and privacy rights.
The Connecticut House of Representatives passed a bill earlier this week that strengthens state protections against racial profiling. The bill, if signed into law, would enhance elements of an existing law that mandates data collection on the race and ethnicity of those stopped by police, which was ignored by many police departments in the state.
On May 9th, Mayor Ed Lee of San Francisco signed into law the Safe San Francisco Civil Rights Ordinance, which governs issues of transparacy, accountability, and civil rights in collaborations between local police and the FBI, particularly through the city's Join Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). The JTTF was created in 2007 between the FBI and local police, and allowed surveillance beyond the scope of what California and San Francisco laws allow. For example, the JTTF could conduct surveillance on individuals without suspicion of criminal activity.
May 8, 2012, Washington, D.C. – Today, 206 civil rights, human rights, immigrant rights and faith-based organizations pressed Attorney General Eric Holder to fulfill his stated commitment to ending racial profiling by reforming the Department of Justice (DOJ) June 2003 Guidance Regarding the Use of Race by Federal Law Enforcement Agencies.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Keith Rushing, Rights Working Group, 202.591.3305.
Nasreen Hosein, South Asian Americans Leading Together, 301.270.1855
Sandhya Bathija, American Civil Liberties Union, 202.675.2312
Ibrahim Hooper, Council on American-Islamic Relations, 202.744.7726
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Keith Rushing, Communications Manager, krushing@Rightsworkinggroup (p) 202.591.3305, (c) 202.557.4291
April 24, 2012, Washington, D.C. – A coalition of human rights, civil rights and immigrant rights groups today called on the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down Arizona’s racial profiling law, SB1070. The Supreme Court will begin hearing oral arguments in United States v. Arizona tomorrow.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Keith Rushing, Communications Manager krushing@rightsworkinggroup.org<mailto:krushing@rightsworkinggroup.org
(p (202) 591-3305 (c) (202) 557-4291
Juana’s story is one of Breakthrough’s most shared and talked- about videos.
On April 30, 2012, the Sikh Coalition unveiled a mobile application to report profiling at airports in real time. Users can document their experience at the airport by answering a series of questions aimed at identifying what happened at the airport, who or what agency was involved, and more importantly, sending the complaint directly to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as well as the Sikh Coalition.
