PROVIDENCE — Eight years after studies began suggesting that race affects which cars Rhode Island police stop and search, racial profiling continues because the police haven’t acted to end the practice, witnesses told the state branch of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights yesterday.

Civil rights advocates said they want legislation to restrict some police practices, and outside experts suggested ways that Rhode Island can deal with the continuing problem. What’s also needed, speakers said, is a way to identify the officers who are inappropriately stopping and searching minority drivers.

Most of the police chiefs testifying at the hearing repeated past assertions that they don’t tolerate discriminatory enforcement and that they are working hard with civil rights groups to solve the problem, largely through better training for officers.

“The problem of racial profiling is still going on,” said Norman G. Orodenker, chairman of the Rhode Island Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “The question is, what do we do about it.” He said the committee will issue a report and probably recommend state legislation.

Ramon Martinez, president of Progreso Latino, the Hispanic advocacy group, said the minority group members “ardently believe” that racial profiling goes on, and said that the studies already done in Rhode Island “all confirmed that racial profiling exists.”

The police, he said, have adopted a self-imposed “blindness.”

“The police force is saying it does not exist,” Martinez said. “They will not acknowledge it. They call it a ‘disparity in the numbers.’ ”

Three years of data, said Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, provide “irrefutable” proof. The data shows that blacks and Latinos are twice as likely to have their cars searched as whites, while the police found more contraband in the whites’ cars. That is, he said, “the essence of racial profiling.”

The annual reports the police are required to file on how they’re addressing the data, Brown said, show that most police departments “have done, essentially, nothing with it.”

Committee member James Vincent asked chiefs at the hearing whether they believe racial profiling exists.

“Yes, I do,” said Gary P. Dias, the former East Providence police chief and now executive high sheriff.

“No, it does not exist in the state police,” said Col. Brendan P. Doherty, the state police superintendent.

“There’s no indication that the issue is going away,” said Jack McDevitt, the Northeastern University dean who oversaw the two statewide Rhode Island profiling studies between 2000 and 2006 as well as studies in other states.

McDevitt said that some statistical disparities between the treatment of minority group members and of whites have legitimate explanations. But he pointed to searches, where non-whites are consistently targeted and most of which find nothing, and said they have a “drastic” impact on trust in the police.

Several witnesses said that, by searching vehicles driven by minorities for no reason, the police waste time that could be devoted to useful law enforcement while angering and alienating the drivers stopped.

McDevitt said that experience elsewhere shows that traffic stop data should be used to identify problem officers. The next step, he said, is to talk to the officers. Most police officers aren’t biased, he said, and “the vast majority of the officers changed their behavior.”

“Some don’t change their behavior because they’re racist,” McDevitt said, and can be terminated.

James E. Johnson, a former U.S. Justice Department official who headed New Jersey’s Advisory Committee on Police Standards, described the system that helped the state police there recover after a scandal stemming from profiling incidents on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Traffic stop data lets New Jersey commanders keep track of individual troopers’ activity. Disproportionate stops, Johnson said, are a reason to ask the trooper, “What’s going on?”

Also, Johnson said, “There are officers who come to the job with an agenda. Data can help ferret that out.”

McDevitt said that police chiefs “do not want any of their officers to discriminate.” But he said that “the chief has to stand up to his officers and has to say, ‘We have to do this.’ ”

Statewide data collection in Rhode Island ended after the studies completed in 2003 and 2006.

The state Department of Transportation says it plans to begin a new collection and analysis program, but the start has been delayed by software problems. Janice Loiselle, administrator of the state highway safety office, said she hopes the program will get under way statewide next year.

blandis@projo.com