Good morning.It was my honor to serve as Chair of Amnesty International USA's national hearings on racial profiling.

As a former federal judge and former state and federal prosecutor, I have spent most of my professional career either working with law enforcement or observing law enforcement practices as a judge. I have no hesitation in saying that most law enforcement officials perform their difficult duties with honor, integrity and professionalism. Fighting crime, conducting investigations, and doing what is necessary to protect our communities and our country has always fallen to the good men and women who have chosen to "protect and serve," often at considerable risk to their personal safety, and, too often, at the cost of their own lives. Their jobs, no doubt, have become far more difficult in recent times as our nation has had to face a new and amorphous enemy, cold-blooded and calculating, and willing to kill indiscriminately in order to further his twisted and misguided aims.

I support and applaud legitimate efforts law enforcement has undertaken to make us safer in these difficult times. But as the recently completed hearings on racial profiling make clear, some of these practices do not make us safer, in fact, make us more vulnerable and, more importantly, violate the Constitution of the United States and fundamental principles of human dignity.

Racial profiling occurs when law enforcement officials, selectively and in the absence of a suspect-specific description, consider characteristics such as race, ethnicity, national origin or religion in deciding whom to investigate, arrest and prosecute. It is wrong, and nothing that happened on September 11, 2001, makes it right.

This is a practice that has actually impeded effective law enforcement for many years, as any competent and experienced law enforcement official will tell you. Obviously, focusing first and foremost, or worse, solely, upon such characteristics diverts attention from actual criminal behavior and from the actual perpetrator of a crime.

If, for example, Muslims or persons of Middle Eastern descent are assumed to be most likely to commit acts of terrorism in the United States and are, therefore, as a group susceptible to profiling merely on the basis of race, religion or ethnicity, then other Al Qaeda affiliates who do not fit the profile may go unnoticed. The cases of John Walker Lindh and Richard Reid demonstrate the weaknesses inherent in the racial profile frequently used in the war on terror. Fortunately, these individuals are in custody. But how many more like them are out there among us, and wouldn't it be both a travesty and a tragedy if something were to happen because of an improper focus upon the wrong suspect for the wrong reasons?

Effective law enforcement devolves into a hazy morass of untested assumptions, faulty analyses, false information, and incorrect premises when it becomes polluted by the odious practice of using race, ethnicity or religion as the primary basis for predicting who might commit, or who might have committed, a criminal act or an act of terrorism. Thus, the hearings demonstrated that it is not only the victims of racial profiling whose basic humanity is compromised; effective law enforcement is compromised, too.

But we also learned that there is, indeed, a significant human cost involved, and it is nothing short of our most precious, our most fundamental value: our dignity.

The incidents referred to in the report we release today reflect numerous examples of upstanding, law-abiding citizens and non-citizens of all types and backgrounds being subjected to humiliating and degrading investigative tactics merely because they had the misfortune of being born black, Latino, or Native American; or merely because they were of Middle Eastern descent and worshipped a different God.

Some of the victims who fall into the latter group were second-and third-generation Americans who, because of the treatment they were subjected to, have lost faith in the America they had come to believe really was a land of fairness and decency, of religious and racial tolerance; a land of equality before the law. There were many who told us that, for them, the only saving grace was that we were there, to listen and to learn, and then to report what we had learned in the hope that something might be done. Today, we begin to fulfill our commitment to them and, we hope, to this great nation, which has in the past found the light to see its way toward correcting injustices wherever they may occur.

The End Racial Profiling Act is one good place to start. The attacks of September 11, 2001, in many ways require us to revisit the depth of our country's regard for our basic freedoms. Racial profiling poses a threat to our fundamental values of equality, fairness and decency. Passing a law to eradicate this practice would go a long way toward preserving human rights and ensuring the security of this great nation. Thank you.

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