House Bill to Curb “Racist” Police May Require Quotas

A bill introduced in the House (HR 7120) by California democrat Karen Bass appears to encourage police departments to adopt race and gender based quotas to avoid being sued.  NBC News reports that the Biden Administration is supporting the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act to tackle “systemic racism — in police departments.”  Attorney Hans Bader, who reviews the bill in Liberty Unyielding, suggests that it might actually cause racism.  “Under the bill, what matters is numbers and racial bean counting, not actual racism or sexism.”  Disparate impact in police stops or interviews based on race or gender is defined as “prima facie evidence” of a “violation,”  under the proposed law.

“The bill’s strange definition of profiling would render all police departments presumptively in violation of the Act, because “Men … commit crimes at a higher rate than women.  Yet stopping men at a higher rate would be deemed suspect under the bill.”

“The bill also ignores the fact that there are racial differences in crime rates and traffic violations….As the U.S. Supreme Court noted in U.S. v. Armstrong, crime rates differ by race.  That’s why arrest rates differ by race, as a recent federal study of violent crime shows.”

“So all police departments everywhere are presumptively guilty under the bill.  The bill doesn’t explain how they can possibly rebut this presumption of guilt or prove themselves innocent.”   The only way a department can avoid being sued, is to adopt quotas in police stops.

As  noted by the Seventh Circuit’s holding in People Who Care v. Rockford Board of Education (1997)  regarding racial disparities in school discipline, “Racial disciplinary quotas violate equity,” by “either systematically overpunishing the innocent or systematically underpunishing the guilty.”   The same logic applies to gender or racial quotas in police stops.

As is often the case with both federal and state laws attempting to eliminate disproportional outcomes in policing, because the laws ignore gender and racial differences in offense rates, every agency regulated under such laws can be found guilty.  This reality makes such laws tools for politically-motivated legal attacks on any police department by race hustlers looking for a cash settlement and a headline.   As usual, minority neighborhoods will get nothing from this but more crime.