The Importance of Data in Building Community Police Relations John Lamberth, Ph. D. President, Lamberth Consulting I would like to express my appreciation to the Special Rapporteur for Minority Issues for the invitation to speak to this forum. Today, I would like describe our work over the last several years in determining whether racial profiling is occurring and working with community groups in the cities where the police have invited us to analyze their data. I turn immediately to data that are necessary to determine whether a police agency is targeting minorities either as motorists or as pedestrians. A stop by the police can begin a process in which an individual is caught up in the justice system and if that stop is made because the individual is a minority it may well be discriminatory. Therefore it is important to have a record of all police stops including those that do not result in a citation or other action by the police. The data should include, at a minimum, the race/ethnicity of the person stopped, the date and time, exact location, reason for the stop and any action taken by the police on the basis of the stop, such as restraining or searching the individual, or an arrest. If a search is conducted, a record should be kept of any contraband confiscated by the police. In many countries at least some of these data are routinely recorded. The next step in data analysis is to determine a standard against which the stop data will be compared. We routinely determine the race/ethnicity of the population from which the police select people to stop. This means that we send trained observers to the locations