Guilt By Association

• Police increasingly replace stop-and-frisk practices with databases that crudely profile Black and Latinx youth based on their neighborhoods, peer groups, and clothing.

• These databases ruin lives: police typecast minority youths as gang members without evidence, putting them at risk of false arrest and wrongful deportation.

• Many police departments refuse to implement due process safeguards despite clear evidence that their databases are based on racial profiling, not evidence.

• Even the most rigorous safeguards would be insufficient to mitigate the full range of harms that these databases pose. They must be eliminated in their entirety.

This report was supported in part by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

We extend a special thanks to our external reviewers: Babe Howell, Professor, CUNY School of Law; Keegan Stephan, Associate, Beldock Levine & Hoffman LLP; and Sandhya Kajeepeta, Senior Researcher, Thurgood Marshall Institute at the Legal Defense Fund.

We also extend a special thanks to Shannon O'Toole for editing the paper.

Read the full report.