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ACLU Of South Dakota Seeks Records About FBI Collection Of Racial And Ethnic Data |
SIOUX FALLS -- The American Civil Liberties Union of South Dakota Chapter today asked the FBI to turn over records related to the agency's collection and use of race and ethnicity data in local communities. According to a 2008 FBI operations guide, FBI agents have the authority to collect information about and map so-called "ethnic-oriented" businesses, behaviors, lifestyle characteristics and cultural traditions in communities with concentrated ethnic populations. ACLU affiliate offices across the nation today filed coordinated Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to uncover records about this activity from their local FBI field offices.
"With the large American Indian population and the growing immigrant population we are concerned that the FBI could be implementing policies in South Dakota that could lead to increased policing based upon race and ethnicity" said Robert Doody, Executive Director of the ACLU of South Dakota. Complaints of racial profiling and FBI intelligence gathering against American Indians have long been a complaint in South Dakota. Those complaints have been directed at both state and local law enforcement.
The FBI's power to collect, use, and map racial and ethnic data in order to assist the FBI's "domain awareness" and "intelligence analysis" activities is described in the 2008 FBI Domestic Intelligence and Operations Guide (DIOG). The FBI released the DIOG in heavily redacted form in September 2009, but a less-censored version was not made public until January of this year, in response to a lawsuit filed by Muslim Advocates. Although the DOIG has been in effect for more than a year and a half, very little information is available to the public about how the FBI has implemented this authority.
"The FBI's mapping of local communities and businesses based on race and ethnicity, as well as its ability to target communities for investigation based on supposed racial and ethnic behaviors, raises serious civil liberties concerns," said Michael German, ACLU policy counsel and former FBI agent. "Creating a law enforcement profile of a neighborhood based on the ethnic makeup of the people who live there or the types of businesses they run is unfair, un-American and will certainly not help stop crime."
Request under Freedom of Information Act |
