SAN FRANCISCO - The ACLU of Northern California, Bay Area Police Watch, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, Intergroup Clearinghouse, La Raza Centro Legal, and other civil rights organizations are calling on the San Francisco Police Commission to take immediate action to address the issue of racial profiling by the San Francisco Police Department. The Commission is scheduled to hold a hearing on Wednesday, November 13 @ 5:30 pm at 850 Bryant St. 5th floor. At the hearing the groups will urge the Police Commission to do the following:

In a comprehensive report released last month, the ACLU of Northern California found that the San Francisco Police Department failed to “adequately address the issue of racial profiling” despite clear direction from the Police Commission three years ago.

“The San Francisco Police Department continues to lack a clear policy prohibiting racial profiling and vast numbers of stops and searches have gone unreported,” said Mark Schlosberg, Police Practices Policy Director of the ACLU-NC and author of the report. “The Police Commission must act quickly to remedy this situation.”

The ACLU-NC analyzed the first full year of data collected by the SFPD and found that African American motorists are significantly more likely to be stopped by police officers in every police district in the city; African Americans are 3.3 and Latinos are 2.6 times more likely to be searched following a traffic stop then whites; and African Americans are more than twice as likely as whites to be asked their consent to be searched without any probable cause of a crime. The report also found a massive underreporting of stops and searches by SFPD officers, suggesting that the problem may be much greater than the data suggests.