The ACLU-VT has joined ACLU affiliates around the country in asking the FBI for 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.

Racial and ethnic profiling is not good police work. It’s surprising that an agency as professional as the FBI even considers such an approach. Law enforcement is about the detection of crime — not assumptions that people with a certain skin color, hairstyle, or food preference commit crimes.

We’re hoping that FBI agents operating in Vermont recognize this is a tool not worth using, and haven’t done any mapping.

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 made public in January of this year, in response to a lawsuit filed by the group, Muslim Advocates.

Although the DIOG 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 a 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.”

The ACLU-Vermont is one of 32 ACLU affiliates filing coordinated Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests on Tuesday with local FBI field offices.

For more information:

• ACLU-VT FOIA request to FBI.
• Muslim Advocates Web site, with links to the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence and Operations Guide (DIOG) and to information about the lawsuit forcing disclosure of the document.
• ACLU “Spy Files” Web site (see “Use of race and ethnicity” section), which includes a report by a Congressional Quarterly writer that the FBI had tracked San Francisco falafel sales to try to find Iranian terrorists.