State Rep. Tyrone Brooks (D-Moronville) attempts to fix what isn’t broken and stop all those racist, white cops we have in Georgia

State Representative Tyrone Brooks has decided that it is again time for him to remedy what isn’t broken and, in the process, grow the bureaucracy and ultimately hurt law enforcement across Georgia.

His poorly thought out answer to accomplish all this is House Bill 53, which is co-sponsored by five other Democrats who also evidently seek to hurt law enforcement.

In effect, HB53 would stop “racial profiling” from being the basis for an arrest by a law enforcement officer…except, it doesn’t stop there (and isn’t even needed, to boot).

HB 53, in particular, states that “[l]aw enforcement officers shall not use a person’s race or ethnicity to form probable cause or reasonable suspicion to stop a vehicle but may use a person’s race or ethnicity to confirm a previously obtained description of a suspect.”

Super, Representative Brooks, except that is already the law. State v. Armstrong, 223 Ga. App. 350, 351; 477 S.E.2d 635, 637 (1996) already lays out what is required for a reasonable, articulable suspicion for a traffic stop. What the Court of Appeals requires, at a bare minimum, is “objective observations, information from police reports, the modes or patterns of certain kinds of lawbreakers, and the inferences drawn and dedications made by a trained law enforcement officer.” Some examples of this can be found in any violation of O.C.G.A. Title 40, Chapter 6, where a variety of traffic violations are listed.

But that’s what Brooks wants to fix, some may say! All those racist white cops who pull over innocent black people must be stopped and the law doesn’t protect them!

Not so fast, amigo.

State v. Winnie, 242 Ga. App. 228, 529 S.E.2d 215 (2000) makes clear that the mere fact that an officer thinks that a driver’s behavior is unusual will not establish a justification for a stop if the driver commits no traffic violation, is conducting no apparant criminal activity and is making no attempt to flee. Thus, simply being a member of an ethnic community is insufficient for a stop by an officer and such a case would be thrown out of court if it even made it that far.

The real goal of Representative Brooks and his motley crew of fools is contained further down in the proposed legislation. Every time a vehicle is stopped “to issue a citation or to make an arrest, that officer shall document the following information in a public record whose format shall be determined by the Department of Motor Vehicle Safety: (A) The gender of the driver; (B) The race or ethnicity of the driver; (C) The suspected violation that led to the stop; (D) Whether the vehicle, personal effects, driver, or any passenger was searched and, if any passenger or his or her effects were searched, the passenger’s gender and the passenger’s race or ethnicity; (E) Whether a search was conducted pursuant to consent, probable cause, or reasonable suspicion to suspect a crime, including the approximate duration of the search and the basis for the request for consent or the circumstances establishing probable cause or reasonable suspicion; (F) Whether contraband was found, the type and approximate amount of contraband, and whether contraband was seized; (G) Whether any arrest, citation, or any oral or written warning was issued as a result of the stop; (H) Whether the officer making the stop encountered any physical resistance, whether the officer engaged in the use of force, and whether injuries resulted; (I) Whether the circumstances surrounding the stop were the subject of any investigation and the results of that investigation; and (J) The location of the stop.”

If a stop is made and the officer does not issue a citation, “then the officer shall provide the motorist with a card showing the officer’s name, badge number, and the name of the officer’s law enforcement agency.
Law enforcement agencies shall maintain the data required to be collected of this subsection for not less than seven years.”

Now, what is so bad about this? First, it places yet another burden on the Department of Motor Vehicle Safety to maintain additional databases to store all this information for each traffic stop everywhere in the state, categorized by each individual officer. This is an unneeded expense because this information is already recorded on the traffic citation which is maintained in the Magistrate and State Court for each respective county. It’s only the disposition of each citation which is transmitted to the Department of Drivers Services.

What is even more distressing is that this database will be able to be utilized to pull up, for each officer, the percentages of his traffic stops based upon race (as if that is the only criteria that law enforcement utilizes in its efforts to keep the community safe). Thus, a white officer working in South DeKalb is (gasp) going to appear quite racist to Representative Brooks when his records are run because 90% of those he stops are black! Of course, the black officer in Paulding County who stops whites 90% of the time won’t be racist, mind you.

All this legislation will do is give pause to white officers in the performance of their duties to consider if stopping someone they believe is committing criminal acts will hurt their careers because the suspect is of a certain racial group.

Representative Brooks, who is also president of these clowns, should drop his own bigotry and realize that his efforts will only serve to hurt the communities he seeks to help and that law enforcement in Georgia is not populated by the raving racists he seems to think are there.