Community leaders called for Austin Police Chief Stan Knee to ban consent searches by the Austin Police Department at a Wednesday news conference.
In a consent search, police ask drivers for permission to search their cars.
Police use consent searches when they have no probable cause - enough evidence to search one's vehicle without that person's consent.
But community groups say police use these searches to intimidate citizens, and often threaten to arrest them for misdemeanors like speeding if they don't consent.
The Austin Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and the Texas League of United Latin American Citizens held the conference in response to a racial profiling report released Tuesday by the Steward Research Group Inc.
The report, conducted on behalf of the Texas Criminal Justice Reform Coalition and the three advocacy groups who held the conference, found that Austin police stop blacks 1.8 times more than they stop Caucasians, and they stop Latinos 1.5 times more than Caucasians.
"Most sane people can look at these numbers and see this is a problem," said Nelson Linder, president of Austin's NAACP.
Community relations with the police would improve, he said, "if more concerned white people would tell the truth in this community."
Andrew Bucknall, a member of Huston-Tillotson Young Democrats and the Martin Luther King Neighborhood Association, stood with his neighbor, Maggie White Demps, a pastor at Greater Faith Christian Church, to talk about how she and her son were victims of racial profiling by the Austin Police.
"When I lived in West Austin, and I heard about these things ... I didn't see that in my neighborhood. I didn't believe it," Bucknall said. "I believe it now."
Dedrick Demps was mistakenly identified as a suspect because he drove a car similar to the one that belonged to a friend of the true criminal, Bucknall said. Police pointed several firearms - including a shotgun - at him, handcuffed him and made him kneel on the street, Bucknall added.
Knee needs no approval from the City Council to ban consent searches, said Ann Del Llano, a spokeswoman for the Texas ACLU's Police Accountability Project.
"The chief could do this today with the stroke of his pen," Del Llano said. "The longer he doesn't, the stronger the pressure will become on him."
Many other community groups have endorsed the proposal to ban consent searches, Del Llano added.
The three groups involved with the press conference will hold a series of 12 town meetings to address the issue of racial profiling in Texas, including one in Austin scheduled for March 4, said Ana Yáñez-Correa, a policy director for LULAC. Yáñez-Correa said that cultural unawareness often leads police to suspect Hispanics.
"Culturally, we are taught to respect law enforcement, not to look police in the eye," she said. "The police officer says 'Hmm, they have something to hide.'"
Assistant Police Chief Rick Coy said that though he disagrees with the community groups' desire to ban consent searches, he respects their attempt to improve race relations between the community and police.
Though 88 percent of consent searches yield no contraband, "We're not going to ban consent searches," Coy said.
Knee expressed concerns over the department's high percentage of unproductive consent searches before the report was released, Coy said.
"We're looking at ways right now to reduce that number," he said.
Coy said consent searches and probable cause searches are a part of a police officer's job.
"We would not want to be limiting a police officer's ability to solve crimes," Coy said.
City Manager Toby Futrell said Knee plans to reduce unproductive searches by 40 percent over the next two years.
"We do agree that consent searches are done too much and are an unproductive use of police time," Futrell said.
However, the one time out of 10 that the police find contraband with a consent search is worth using the search method, she said.
"It's never as simple as all or nothing," Futrell added. "But an 88-percent no-find rate is not efficient."
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