New York & California Laws Turn Police Into Clerks

Imagine you are a police officer in a high-crime urban district responding to a report of a drive by shooting.  As you and your partner begin talking to witnesses a local law requires you to fill out a form listing the race, age and sex of everybody you talk to. The New York City Council has just passed the “How Many Steps Act” to require police to do this, supposedly to discourage racial profiling. California puts even more of a burden on police with the Racial & Identify Profiling Act. As a legislator, Attorney General Rob Bonta voted for this law. It requires officers to fill out an eight page form with 200 fields. Heather MacDonald has this City Journal piece breaking down what amounts to the most stupid anti-police legislation ever adopted.

The form, generated by the California Department of Justice, comes straight from race-and gender-studies classrooms. The officer first documents whether he, the officer, is a “cisgender man, cisgender woman, transgender man, transgender woman, or nonbinary person.” To avoid placing a retrogressive “gender” straitjacket on the state’s public servants, the form allows an officer to check both “Nonbinary person” and one of the other categories, such as “Cisgender woman.” “N/A” is not an option; the officer must list a sexual identity. Naturally, there is also an extensive “Officer race or ethnicity” section, asking whether the officer is “Asian, Hispanic/Latine(X), Black/African, Native American, Middle Eastern or South Asian, Pacific Islander, White,” or a combination of the above.

Then the officer documents the civilian’s “perceived sexual orientation: LGB+ or Straight/Heterosexual” and the civilian’s “perceived gender: Cisgender man/boy, Cisgender woman/girl, Transgender man/boy, transgender woman/girl, or nonbinary person.” Here, too, the discerning officer is allowed to surmise that the person stopped is both a “Transgender man/boy” and a “Nonbinary person.” How is the officer to make those judgments, without engaging in culpable “stereotyping”? Police academies across the state are going to have to contract with Judith Butler for a “gender theory” module. The civilian’s “perceived race or ethnicity” must be as narrowly described.

None of this information has anything to do with apprehending criminals or solving crimes. The law turns police officers into clerks collecting data for race and gender identity narratives. Is anyone surprised that New York and California cities are hemorrhaging police officers and failing to recruit replacements? Both states are awash with carjackings, gang shootings, drug trafficking, looting and assault. Police are too busy filling out Attorney General Bonta’s forms than to actually catch criminals. It is high time for the voting public to fire the politicians who voted for this idiocy.