Spain Police Accused of Rampant Racial Profiling

Amnesty International on Wednesday accused Spanish authorities of using racial and ethnic profiling, with police singling out people who are not white in order to meet quotas.

In a new report, the human rights group said some police stations in Madrid have weekly and monthly quotas for ID checks and detentions of immigrants not carrying residency papers or work permits, encouraging officers to target people belonging to ethnic minorities, even if they are living legally in Spain as residents or are citizens.

“People who do not ‘look Spanish’ can be stopped by police as often as four times a day,” said Izza Leghtas, the Amnesty researcher who investigated and wrote the Spain report.

The group said African and Latin American immigrants–both legal and illegal–are most frequently targeted by officers who demand their IDs in neighborhoods with heavy immigrant populations, on public transportation and in parks.

A spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry on Wednesday said the ministry rejects the allegations and does not carry out racial profiling. {snip}

{snip}

Amnesty said that under Spanish law police can check the identity of people in public places when there is a security concern. The group’s research, however, revealed that deliberate identity checks on foreigners without any security concern is widespread.

{snip}

Spain underwent a wave of immigration from the 1990s to 2008 amid an extended economic boom that was cut short in 2008 by the financial crisis and a recession that lasted nearly two years. Leghtas said successive Spanish governments have used “stop and search powers abusively as a way to control migration.”

{snip}