Topeka ? About 130 people crowded into a Senate committee meeting to hear testimony on a proposal that would make racial profiling by police officers illegal in Kansas.

The bill would make it illegal for law enforcement to use race, ethnicity or national origin, gender or religious dress as the sole factor for deciding which people to question in routine investigations. About 15 people testified Thursday in support of it; two testified against the bill.

The bill also would require police agencies to adopt policies on racial profiling and train officers. Officers could be reprimanded, suspended or fired if they violated written policies of that agency.

Citizens who believe they were victims of racial profiling would be able to file complaints or a civil lawsuit against police agencies.

More than 20 other states, including Missouri, have similar laws on the books, according to Danielle Dempsey-Swopes, executive director of the Kansas African-American Affairs Commission.

The bill’s main sponsors, Democrats Sen. Donald Betts Jr. of Wichita and Sen. David Haley of Kansas City, Kan., wanted to place criminal penalties in the bill and establish a citizen review board to investigate complaints. Haley said those provisions were taken out as a compromise with law enforcement.

But Haley said the current version was better than nothing and has the support of law enforcement, which could improve its chances of passage.

Organizations representing minority groups and representatives of law-enforcement agencies testified in favor of the bill at the hearing held by the Senate Federal and State Affairs Committee. The committee is scheduled to vote on the bill Thursday.

Elias Garcia, executive director of the Kansas Hispanic and Latino American Affairs Commission, said racial profiling reduces a person to an object.

“By doing so, it paves the way to a mind-set that portrays that individual as unworthy of basic human respect or dignity, and this practice has no place in public service,” he told the panel.

Haley said he introduced a similar bill in 2000, but couldn’t get legislators to believe there was a problem. A study was commissioned, and it found evidence that minority groups were more likely to be stopped by police than whites, Dempsey-Swopes said.

The measure would establish a task force to determine how to obtain continuous data from traffic stops that would suggest areas where racial profiling was a problem. Missouri has such a system for capturing that data.

Lt. Col. Steve Smith of the Overland Park Police Department testified against the bill. He warned the committee that the problem was too complex to be solved by a state law.

The bill “is a road map to more questions than answers to the issue,” Smith said.