State lawmakers circulate letter to colleagues asking for REAL ID support based on police officer safety benefits.

Dear Colleague:

As state legislators we share your understanding of how important it is to give our local and state police officers the tools they need to protect themselves from unexpected dangers. There is no such thing as a “routine” traffic stop and we want our officers to know we will support them with the best technology we can afford.

Our police officers and our citizens need and deserve highly-secure driver’s licenses and ID cards. Driver’s licenses have been issued by states for more than 100 years but in recent years, well before Sept. 11, 2001, state-issued licenses assumed a new role as the most widely accepted form of ID in America. Because of this, Congress passed the REAL ID Act in 2005 to set up minimum security standards in states for the production of licenses and the procedures used to issue them.

Our citizens and our police officers need the secure credentials that the federal act is designed to promote. We also need sufficient money from Congress that will help states share some, but not all, of the extra costs of new regulations.

The waiting is over. In early March the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued proposed regulations on how states might implement the REAL ID Act. They are reasonable and good-faith rules to accommodate state needs and they have now been posted for public comment by your driver’s license issuing agency or vehicle administrators. You read the regulations for yourself or download them from the DHS web site at http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/nprm_realid.pdf.

Chuck Canterbury, national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, recently wrote that for his organization, support for REAL ID, is “very much an officer safety issue.” In a letter to Congressional leaders of both parties, Canterbury also wrote that REAL ID “does not infringe on the privacy rights of any U.S. citizen, nor is it a ‘national identification card,’ nor does it create a national database of driver’s licenses. In fact, the model used by the REAL ID Act already exists for commercial drivers’ licenses (CDLs). It is a common sense system that takes the right approach to ensuring the security and authenticity of the most commonly used identity document in the United States—a driver’s license.”

Earlier this year, a few states considered resolutions calling on Congress to repeal REAL ID based on unfounded concerns. We think some of our colleagues acted in haste before the DHS regulations were even posted. For our part, we urge Congress to appropriate the money states need to transition to licenses with much better security features, that ensure that applicants are lawfully resident in the U.S., and that help protect our police officers in doing their critical job of making sure they know the identity of a citizen.