of enormous credibility. he's probably the man in the justice department both under the bush and the obama team in whom i have the greatest personal regard and respect. sen quo non. and with all that i encourage you to encourage him to take a much more active position on these threat assessments, which i fear are only the tip of the iceberg. the attorney general guidelines allow now them to begin investigations on anyone they choose so long as they can claim they're doing it to gain information on criminal activities, national security or foreign intelligence. and the amount of reporting on those threat assessments is rather limited, as we all know. asking those tough questions, how many of these threat assessments have been opened? how many of them are ongoing? they allow them to collect unlimited physical surveillance. we encourage the attorney general to retire the use of these threat assessments, but at

the very first step, you can ask the fbi to do more vigorous reporting on you, even if it is in camera. retraining is essential. remember, all the folks that got that lovely little chart showing how the arab mind is a cluster mind, and i'm quoting verbatim. is a cluster thinker while the western mind tends to be a linear thinker. they were trained on this. so until we retrain them and tell them that that's not the case, was never the case, they're going to continue to do those activities. and so i think retraining is essential, and probing into the assessments and how those assessments are used particularly in a muslim context would be a place of important focus. >> thank you. thank you, mr. chairman. i notice you're back. so you already took the gavel. didn't you?

thank you all. thank you. >> senator kuntz. >> thank you, chairman durbin. thank you for calling this hearing for your long and passionate and vigilant advocacy for civil rights and for your real leadership in this area for this legislation and for this hearing. in my own role prior to becoming a senator as county executive, i worked hard in the supervision of about a 380-sworn officer department to ensure that we had effective and strong outreach. not just traditional subject to harassment and communities like the african-american and latino communities but also post-9/11 making sure there was better training and outreach in relationship with our muslim community, given some incidents that occurred with our lgbt community making sure we stayed as a policing organization engaged. and accountable. and i just wanted to start,

officer gale and chief davis, by thanking you for your leadership in the policing community and for your service to the public. i appreciate your starting by just helping me understand what's the impact on a police force? that practices racial profiling, where it's either part of the policy or training, part of history or part of current practice? what's the impact on professionalism, promotional advancement and cooperation with communities? that's been touched on. you noticed because of votes, a number of us have had to step in and out and i'd be interested in your response. >> thank you. i think it's multiple parts by me. inside the organization, which we did not talk about, an agency that does engage in systemic racial profiling usually has very low morale, because now you have ulcers inside the organization that are opposed to it, those that are engaging in it and in its causes a conflict within itself. within a community, i would also probably argue that the community is suffering, because now you have a practice in which is losing touch with the community, making them very ineffective. in today's society, makes it much more expensive.

because now you have the cost of crime going up. you have the cost of litigation, because people are now seeking some type of redress to the court system, and you have low morale issues, which means you have increases in sick leave, workers' comp claims and expensive when you engage in racial profiling. most importantly, you have a community that denies some basic rights. as you know as a county executive you cannot serve it effectively. always challenges and strain, to the extent there's outrage, trying to agree. and respond respect, i thinkbet effective, from a chief's, an executive's perspective is this poor managerial practice that results in loss of revenues,

support, like i said, causes internal strife. it just is not an effective strategy. >> thank you. would you agree, is this bad policing? >> absolutely. the consequences of bad management in any agency result in these perceptions in the community that the police are not responsive and that they're victimizing citizens and that there's somehow or another a rogue force. that's where it all drives from. it all drives from the management philosophy of the organization. and the chief is right. it does result in low morale. but it also results in low morale not just because of you're going to have people in the agency that would disagree with the practice or the fact that there's no appropriate accountability for officers who are clearly operating outside professional conduct. it has low morale when the community that we serve then becomes, you know, complaining

about us being unprofessional. or about the reputation of the agency being, you know, that of a victimizer as opposed to a protector. so -- and the chief is absolutely right. it starts with the management. it starts with the very top person and the top level people allowing these things to occur in individuals that they won't hold accountable. as a captain in my agency, i believe it's my charge to hold people accountable when they conduct themselves unprofessionally, and i do so. you know. i think some people have said here that you know, well, there seems to be some kind of great thing going on in denver or what have you. i'm just going to tell you, and i love my city and it is a great city. please, feel free to visit any time. okay. but i'm just going to tell you, we hold people accountable in my agency. we hold them accountability and that's expected for, you know, we don't have to have specific rules that say, you can't do this.

because we all know what bad behavior is when we see it, and if you challenge people and you hold them accountable, then there won't be a problem. the end result is that officers will just shut down and not conduct any type of police work, and then the city doesn't get protected. >> senator, if i may add one point. there's a phrase we have especially for chiefs that it calls for a moment of pause. and what happens is when an agency does not have the type of trust and confidence that we're alluding to and discussing, many cases you have racial powder kegs that are sitting there. if you look at our history, usually there's some type of incident. and it gets confusing, because quite often it may be a legal incident, it may be something that really by itself would not make sense to call such a response, but it reflects years of abuse and neglect. it reflects the kind of, i think, one of the congress persons said earlier, enough is enough. so when agencies are blind to this or systematically engaging in it, they're sitting on these

powder kegs that an incident like a trayvon martin or an oscar grant in oakland can ignite and then that's when we see large demonstrations and you start having race riots. because it's not the incident by itself as much as it is the buildup to that incident. the lack of acknowledgement of where we were at before. >> and, chief, if i've heard all the members of the panel right, who have said that racial profiling is bad policy, it's not just those powder keg moments. it's also the simmering distrust, the disconnect from the community you seek to protect and to serve that can also have a negative impact on your effectiveness? on your ability to effectively police. that's something we've heard across the whole panel. i wanted to move, if i could, professor harris to a question about standards. if you look at reasonable suspicion of standard that controls the ability of law enforcement to stop and question an individual, as opposed to probable cause, which covers arrest. profiling appears to me just at first blush to be a much larger problem potentially in the area of reasonable suspicion. how you have seen that play out?

what do you think is important in fighting that standard? and then i'm going to want to move to this bill, and why it might be necessary. professor? >> thank you. thank you for the question, senator. you're absolutely right. you put your finger on something very important. the reasonable suspicion standard arises in terry versus ohio. the case that allows police officers to use stop and frisk when there is reasonable fact-based suspicion. the problem is, and where this can intertwine with profiling is that reasonable suspicion is a very low legal standard. it is lower than probable cause. when i'm in class, i like to say, probable cause is somewhere near my waist. reasonable suspicion is below my knees. and you have a standard where you can use very little evidence to take significant police action. and where we see this showing up in the context of profiling to give you one example is in the

stop and frisk activity in new york city over many years and it's a good example, because there is very significant amount of data on this. we often find that even though the standard is reasonable suspicion, there is hardly anything recorded. and sometimes nothing at all recorded. reflecting reasonable suspicion or the idea is simply thought of as boiler plate. so with that low a standard, profiling and other ineffective approaches to law enforcement run rampant and we have the kind of statistics that mr. romero cited just a minute ago. >> thank you. mr. romero, if i might then, if racial profiling can be a violation of civil rights, as i believe it is, under a whole line of cases, martinez, ponce, montera -- these are not cases that i'm familiar with personally, but that's a line of analysis, i think, by the supreme court that has laid this

out. why do we not see more enforcement actions for racial profiling by the department of justice? and if you would just follow up on professor harris' comment, how do we, in the gap between the formal policies create police entities that, as captain gale describes it, are accountable, are professional, and where at all levels are engaged in moving us forward towards a more just and effective policing community? >> when you look -- thank you for the question, senator kuntz -- when you look at our, the testimony we submitted, you see that we detail a number of the seminole racial profiling cases. in fact, some of them brought by david harris. one might be instructed for why this piece of legislation is essential is to track when the incident occurred and when the case was decided. because you'll note that many, in many instances and the one i'm looking at now, you're looking at a span of several years of time between when you get pulled over by a police

officer on a highway and the case of robert wilkins, and ultimately when that case was decided by a court. and for many minority group members especially those in our communities and families who lack resources to hire private attorneys, it is not simple or economic to retain private counsel, even when you've been wronged. we turn away many, many cases and individuals who write to us every day simply because we lack the resources to take on every single case. we take on cases where we think we have a -- an ability to have a high impact, which means systemically at the highest levels. the number of heartbreaking letters i send back saying i understand you were profiled by the police, but we have them under a consent decree and will throw your fact scenario in the consent decree doesn't really give the individual who's often been aggrieved, even if they're willing to step forward, much comfort. i think that's really what's at stake here.

i think the burden on hundreds of thousands of new yorkers, let's say the 400,000-plus i cited have been wrongfully stopped by the police, the idea you would ask 400,000 new yorkers who were innocent and yet stopped by the police to file all individual lawsuits, i can't believe that any member of this chamber would believe that would be an efficient use of our resources. this is one of the times when by the senate taking action and putting in place a legal regime and being able to stop the type of rush to the courthouse steps due to both the economy and our civil liberties a service. >> senator, if i may, the one area, going to the question you had about the lawsuits, or why people can't file the complaint is, in many cases, i think the bigger challenge is that it may actually follow a legal stop. this is why the legislation is critical. why data collection is critical. i think when we think of profiling people, people sometimes unfortunately think

that the stop itself may not have legal cause. so we have a phrase in policing, give me a car, two minutes and a vehicle code and i'll find a reason to stop you. so the stop may be justified. cracked windshield, bald tires. you know, you'll see those low discretionary stops being used quite often to get to, as to we talked about a pretext to other things. so it makes it hard on an individual basis, the person complains for being stopped but in fact they did have a cracked windshield. or a cracked taillight, and it makes it hard for that individual case, what you need to do to track holistically to see that that's the 10,000th cracked windshield, 90% of them may be all of one group of color. >> i see that i am well past my time and i appreciate the concerns that have been raised by this conversation, this hearing today, about the definition of racial profiling,

about the importance of being narrowly targeted in a legislative response but i'm grateful chairman durbin for your crafting a bill that insists on training on data collection, and on a narrowly crafted response to a significant problem. thank you very much. >> thanks, senator kuntz. following up on your question, i think one of the obstacles, mr. romero can probably back this up, is when you're dealing with the question of whether or not race or ethnicity or profiling is the sole cause for the stop, you run into a real obstacle. our staff did a little research. turns out this isn't the first time that congress has talked about this. arguing the discrimination should only be prohibited if based solely on race and ethnicity has an unfortunate congressional lineage. segregationists attempted to gut the civil rights act of 1964 by offering an amendment that would limited the act's reach of discrimination based solely on race. senator clifford case of new jersey argued in opposition saying this amendment would place upon persons attempting to prove a violation of a section no matter how clear the violation was an obstacle so great as to make the title completely worthless. and senator warren of washington said limiting the civil rights

act on discrimination based solely on race would "negate the entire purpose of what we're trying to do." so the courts have set a standard which makes it extremely difficult, and chief davis, your examples, there might be a cracked taillight, as the reason they're being pulled over. what we found in illinois, incidentally, to go to my home state, consent searches by the illinois state police between 204 and 2010. hispanic motorists in my state were two to four times more likely to be searched. african-american two to three times more likely to be subject to consent searches than white motorists. however, white motorists were 89% more likely than hispanic motorists and 26% more likely than african-american motorists to have contraband in their vehicles. so it made no sense from a law enforcement viewpoint to do this, and yet it is done. i thank you for this hearing, and i'm sorry it took ten years

to get back together, and i'm sorry that we need to get back together, but to put it in historic perspective, back to our nation's very beginning, our founding fathers started wrestling with issues of race, gender and religion, and this year's presidential campaign wrestles with issues of race, issues of gender and religion, and it is an ongoing debate in this nation. there are moments of great leadership and there have been moments of ignominious contact. conduct. as far as accountability is concerned, yes, this would hold law enforcement accountable but i hope we hold every person in our government accountable, including members of congress. let me concede i came to this job saying -- remembers what bill clinton once said when he was being interviewed before he became president. is there any issue you will not compromise on? he said, i will never compromise on race. he said that as a man who grew up in arkansas and saw segregation. i thought that is a good standard, durbin. you saw it, too, in your hometown.

hold to that standard, and i looked back and remember in my time in the house of representatives of voting for a measure that turned out to have a dramatically negative racial impact. the establishment of the crack cocaine standard and sentencing of 100 to 1. years later i was given an opportunity in this committee to try to make that right, and bring it back to 1 to 1. i couldn't get the job done because of the nature of compromise, it's been reduced to 18 to 1. still a terrible disparity but a dramatic improvement. what happened as result of that bad vote? by black and white congressmen? we lost trust in the african-american community. many people serving on juries said i'm not going to do this. i am just not going to send that woman, that person away for ten or 20 years because of a crack cocaine violation. we lost their trust, officer gale. and i can see it when the judges came and talked to us about it. we moved back to try to establish some trust in that community by doing the right thing, but we need to be held

accountable. this senator and all of us. whether we're in elected or appointed office in our government, we serve. we serve the public. and that accountability has to be part of that service. this is not going to resolve the issue. i think it is, i mentioned earlier, more complicated today, because of concealed carry and some of the standards being established in states. more complicated today, as mr. clegg has said, because the war on terror raises legitimate concerns about the safety of our nation and how far will we go to respect our national security, without violating our basic values under the constitution. i thank you all for your testimony. it's been a very positive part of this conversation, which we need to engage in even further. there's a lot of interest in today's hearings. 225 organizations submitted testimony. thank goodness they didn't come here to speak. but we're glad to have their testimony. and we'll put it in the record

without objection. that's good. it will include the episcopal church, illinois association chiefs of police, the illinois coalition for immigrant refugee rights. japanese-american citizens league, leadership conference on civil and human rights, muslim advocates, naacp. national council, national immigration forum, rights working group sheikh coalition. south asian-americans and the southern poverty center and these statements will be made part of the record kept open for a week for additional statements. it's possible someone will send you a written question. it doesn't happen very often, but if they do i hope you'll respond in a timely way. without further comment i thank all of my witnesses for patience and for attending this hearing and look forward to working with all of you. [ gavel sounds ]

next on c-span3, female nobel prize winners discuss women's rights and peacemaking. then young female activists talk about efforts to advance women's issues. after that, tea party activists c.l. bryant discusses why he left the democratic party. with congress on break this week we're featuring american history tv's weekend programs in primetime on c-span3. tonight we look at legacy of

watergate on the 40th anniversary of the break-in. starting at 8:00, tour the watergate exhibit. at 9:00, max holland's book "leak" examining why fbi official mark fephelp -- all we on c-span3. sopa and pippa are dead. i think that's pretty clear that the effort that was undertaken there ran into a lot of controversy and a lot of miscommunication, and so i think those bill, not coming back again this year or any year, for that matter. >> co-chair of the congressional internet caucus and virginia republican bob goodlatte on

process for anti-piracy legislation in the next congress and other telecommunications issues. tonight at 8:00 eastern on "the communi communicators" on c-span2. >> we're going to tighten our belts and spend less. guess what? we all end up poor because all of our spending falls at the same time. remember, this is stuff we're supposed to know. stuff we've known since the 1930s. right? that an attempt of everybody to slash spending at the same time because they think they've got too much debt is -- is self-defeating. >> who's going to tell them the truth? we have to tell them the truth. if we don't tell them the truth, then our country fails. we must succeed in this, and we will succeed in this. we'll reach them up through the media and through politics, and through pop culture. pop culture!

we shouldn't be afraid to get out there and quick preaching to the choir but get out there and be influencers, right in pop culture. >> covering the network panels with paul krugman and elizabeth warn and online discussions with michelle mullikin and sarah palin. watch them online at the c-span video library. three women won the nobel peace prize last october for advocating women's rights and participating in peace building. a panel of women from across africa and the middle east gathered at the john f. kennedy forum at harvard's institute of politics in cambridge to talk about their own experiences. this discussion runs an hour and 35 minutes. >> -- the work of politics but also of women's rights, the women in public policy program, the city for public leadership pe so i want to say a particular thank you to each of those

groups for being part of the cosponsors here. you enjoyed, i hope, the title "why women won the nobel peace prize "and i have the enormous privilege of being in the entourage of president johnson surly, as you know, one of the three winners and graduate of kennedy school. it was so interesting why they chose two as women as a relative of arab spring and i think it was because of this -- this statement they were making about change beginning at the top and the bottom and how you have to have it coming from both directions, because this is a

fabulous grass roots organizer type. so, anyway, sitting there, it was so exciting hearing -- being in this gorgeous room in the city, city -- what did you say? in oslo, yes, city hall. thank you. and 61 years old. if you think that's bad, wait until you ask me the name of someone, like my children. anyway, so here are the words that we heard coming from the nobel committee. they talked about that they were giving these women this prize for their particular work, but also for their nonviolent struggle, and then they said, to ensure women's rights to full participation in peace-building work. now, that is a very important policy statement, because what you're doing then, you're

talking about changing the whole security paradigm. right now security in most people's minds means bombs and bullets. and the question becomes if in fact you have a large participation of women throughout the whole peace process. the peace process doesn't mean simply negotiations, it also means street protests. it means all kinds of social media now to try to prevent a war or bring down a dictator. it means after a war having the transitional justice, the tribunal or the truth and reconciliation commission or having simply an honest government instead of a corrupt government, which can often lead right back into war again. so how do you get women to be fully involved in all of that? well, clearly you have to have the policy makers who are

willing to take a stand. and president obama has done just that on december 19th. he signed an executive order which launched a u.s. national action plan on women, peace and security. and he calls this a comprehensive road map for accelerating and institutionalizing efforts across the united states government to advance women's participation in making and keeping peace. now, there are a whole lot of countries around the world who are doing this, so we are -- it's not like, i'm afraid, that we're leading the charge here, but at least we're coming through and doing our part. then secretary clinton, on the day that this was launched, i'm going to read -- forgive me for reading to y'all, but it's too important not to. she says from northern ireland

to liberia to nepal and many places in between, we have seen that when women participate in peace processes, they focus discussion on issues like human rights, justice, national reconciliation and economic renewal that are critical to making peace but are often overlooked in formal negotiations. they build coalitions around ethnic and sectarian lines and they speak up for other marginalized groups. that's really important that the women are there and -- this isn't hillary, but the women are there not just representing their own points of view, but also the other marginalized groups. they act as mediators and help foster compromise. when women organize in large numbers, they galvanize opinion and help change the course of history. you're going to hear from six extraordinary women tonight, and the first one, will you open this up and give us an opening