SALEM — Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum has proposed legislation for 2017 that requires law enforcement officers to collect information on race during all traffic and pedestrian stops, expand bias training for officers and reduce sentences for certain drug crimes.

The proposal came out of recommendations by a task force on preventing racial profiling, chaired by the attorney general.

“It is only in the aggregation of data that we are able to observe patterns of profiling behavior,” Rosenblum said Wednesday, Dec. 14, during a joint hearing of the House and Senate judiciary committees.

Any traffic stop for speeding “can be justified in isolation as a fair exercise of officer discretion, but across hundreds, or even thousands of stops, patterns can become visible governing who is stopped, who is searched and who is let off without a warning, or with.”

The proposal would require officers to record the race of the person stopped and when a citation or warning are issued, a search is conducted or a person is arrested. The data would be sent to the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission for analysis of enforcement disparities and published in an annual report. The requirement would take effect in 2018 for law enforcement agencies with 100 or more officers and later for smaller agencies.

Gov. Kate Brown signed House Bill 2002 in mid-2015, making Oregon the 31st state to prohibit profiling by law enforcement. The law requires law enforcement agencies to report racial profiling complaints to the Law Enforcement Contacts Policy and Data Review Committee (LECC). The LECC will make its first of what are intended to be annual reports on the complaints in January. That committee also analyzes police stop data voluntarily submitted by the Corvallis Police Department.

The data collection is based on a profiling project in Connecticut, which has a population and law enforcement force of similar size to Oregon’s.

Lawmakers are eyeing the Connecticut project as a potential model for Oregon.

Ken Barone, policy and research specialist at Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy at Central Connecticut State University, manages the law enforcement racial profiling project in that state.

The five-year-old project started when the Connecticut General Assembly passed a law requiring the electronic collection of information on all traffic stops in the state and an annual analysis of the data.

“If you want to try to understand the patterns that are occurring and basic interactions between the community and law enforcement it’s a good window into understanding if disparities exist and then being able to drill down to understand why those disparities exist,” Barone told Oregon lawmakers Dec. 14.

Collecting the data takes less than 60 seconds of a stop and captures 26 data points, he said. Since the law took effect, the number of annual racial profiling complaints in the state has dwindled from 25 to six in 2015, he said.

Oregon had about 28 racial profiling complaints in the past year, according to the LECC.

In Connecticut, researcher analyze stop data on six indicators. Agencies that show disparities in three to six of those indicators are given further scrutiny, Barone said.

“One of the things I don’t think we anticipated is the degree to which this data is helping us, not only understand racial disparities and the factors that are contributing to those disparities, but they’re providing us a really great window into law enforcement practices in general,” he said.

For instance, in Waterbury, Conn., researchers noticed there was a significant number of registration-related motor vehicle enforcement in predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods.

The police chief told researchers that officers targeted those neighborhoods because they were socioeconomically disadvantaged and as such, were more likely to have residents who couldn’t afford to register their vehicles. In fact, in Connecticut, whites are 6 percent more likely to not register their vehicles, Barone said.

“This wasn’t law enforcement officers going out there and deciding they didn’t like particular people and therefore they are going to enforce a certain law against them as a result of that,” he said. “This was anytime as an officer I’ve been told to go look for unregistered vehicles I go into the area that I have always believed to be the most fruitful to find unregistered vehicles.”

About 30 states already collect information on law enforcement stops, Barone said.

Rosenblum’s proposal seeks to expand bias training required for law enforcement. The Department of Public Safety Standards and Training — the state’s law enforcement training agency — started requiring implicit bias training for new officers eight years ago, but the training isn’t required for continuing education. Only about 35 to 40 percent of officers have received adequate training on the elimination of “implicit bias” — the kind of bias that can result in unconscious profiling — according to an estimate by DPSST.

“Similarly an officer who wishes to move into our highest levels of law enforcement should be required to demonstrate their competency to deter profiling by those they supervise,” Rosenblum said.

Finally, the proposal reduces sentences for offenders convicted of possession of a controlled substance when the amount of the drug is for personal use to a maximum of one year in prison and a $6,250. Rosenblum said harsh drug sentences have resulted in a disproportionate number of minorities in prison.