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About 30 buses from throughout the state will travel to Sacramento on Thursday to demonstrate support for legislation that would document racial profiling by California law enforcement agencies. 

One of the buses will leave from South Berkeley Community Church, 1802 Fairview St., with a local contingent led by the Rev. Sandra Decker. The bus leaves at 9 a.m. and returns at 4:30 p.m. 

Police Review Commission member Mel Martynn said that available statistics indicate that drivers who happen to be people of color are stopped more often by police officers because of their skin color. 

During a forum earlier this year at the McGee Avenue Baptist Church, Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson, an African American, discussed his experiences with racial profiling. Carson recalled an incident in which he was stopped by a police officer, even though he was not speeding, he didn’t have a broken taillight, and he wasn’t driving a stolen car. The supervisor said his crime was “driving while black.” 

The demonstrators want Gov. Gray Davis to sign the “driving while black or brown” bill (SB 1389). Sen. Kevin Murray, D-Los Angeles, reintroduced the bill in January after Davis vetoed similar legislation that had passed the Senate and the Assembly earlier. 

“At this point the governor and the governor’s staff continue to have discussions with the authors of this legislation, and we hope we can find middle ground on this bill,” said Hillary McLean, a spokesperson for the governor. 

The governor initiated a voluntary data collection program through the California Highway Patrol. The CHP asked 433 state law enforcement agencies if they collected demographics on traffic stops and learned that 55 jurisdictions are collecting data for an annual report. If Murray’s bill passes, all California law enforcement agencies would be required to collect data regarding the race and ethnicity of motorists stopped and searched by the police, to learn if the agencies are discriminating against people of color. 

Here in Berkeley the police department already is collecting data, said Capt. Bobby Miller. 

“We started last August and that information will be released pretty soon, probably in a couple of weeks,” he said. 

Miller said Berkeley police developed a system for officers to report the traffic stops according to race and sex into the computerized communication center, and it will be retrieved and analyzed. 

“There was no law that required us to do it,” he said. “We just decided it was the right thing to do. We’ll keep our minds open to whatever it says. We are open to corrections.”