Committee chair denies prejudice in killing racial profiling bill

Sen. Ann O'Connell, R-Las Vegas, denied Thursday there was any prejudice or insult to blacks and Hispanics in the decision to kill Sen. Joe Neal's racial-profiling bill.

O'Connell leads the Governmental Affairs Committee, which unanimously killed SB20 on Wednesday.

"I assure Sen. Neal that we are still looking for a vehicle for that and there was never any intent to be insulting to Sen. Neal or blacks and Hispanics," she told the Senate.

Neal angrily charged Wednesday that senators who voted to kill the bill "don't give a damn about blacks and Hispanics being stopped by the police." He said he introduced the bill after a state study compiled by the Attorney General's Office showed blacks and Hispanics are stopped by police in Nevada's urban areas in higher numbers than whites and handcuffed far more often by police.

He repeated some of those charges Thursday in the Senate saying the vote "sent a cold message to minority groups in this state."

"They said, in essence, that the rights of those individuals have been indefinitely postponed in this state," Neal said.

He said Wednesday he was especially angered that the two Democrats, state party chairman and Sen. Terry Care and Minority Leader Dina Titus, both of Las Vegas, supported the motion to kill the bill making racial profiling a misdemeanor.

Care said before the Senate floor session that the bill making an officer guilty of a misdemeanor for racial profiling was practically unenforceable, but that he supports looking for some other way to deal with the issue.

O'Connell told the Senate on Thursday the issue isn't dead. She said Titus asked that the committee try find "another vehicle to address those concerns and we instructed staff to do that."