A New Drive for Justice

On his way to see a doctor about a block from where he works in Beverly Hills, Patrick Earthly said he suddenly found himself confronted by two police officers with their guns drawn, asking what he was doing in the area.

Los Angeles police stopped and handcuffed former Los Angeles Lakers and UCLA basketball star Jamaal Wilkes, allegedly because his license plate tags were about to expire.

A prominent Latino attorney was stopped in what had been an all-white cul de sac in Burbank before he moved there. He said the officers told him: “We haven’t seen you around here before.”

O.J. Simpson prosecutor Christopher Darden says he has been “stopped and confronted by gun-toting officers demanding that I place my hands on the steering wheel or exit my vehicle and lie on the ground.”

Assemblyman Kevin Murray (D-Culver City) was headed out to celebrate with his fiancee after a hard-fought primary election victory in June when Beverly Hills police pulled him over without, he said, giving him any plausible reason for the stop.

A Beverly Hills police spokesman later said Murray was stopped because his car was missing a front license plate, but Murray said the officer never looked at the front of his car during the stop.

In none of these cases were the drivers ticketed. In some, officers refused to give a reason for the stop or became angry when asked for one, the drivers said.

Such incidents are repeated hundreds of times daily across the country, civil liberties lawyers say, and the common thread running through these stops is that the drivers are African American or Latino.

The only crime they have committed, these lawyers cynically suggest, is “DWB”--Driving While Black. Because so many Latinos report similar experiences, DWB has been expanded to mean Driving While Black or Brown.

“It is a fact that white officers stop blacks for no reason,” said Los Angeles Police Sgt. Leonard Ross, president of the Oscar Joel Bryant Foundation, an organization of African American officers. “The problem is that you can’t prove it because the officer is going to fabricate probable cause.”

Cmdr. David Kalish, spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department, responded that it is “unfortunate that Mr. Ross would make such an inflammatory statement when there is no evidence that this phenomenon occurs.

“It is important to note that the city of Los Angeles is extremely diverse and so is its Police Department. Over 50% of the officers are minority or female. In my 23 years on the department, I’ve never observed any officer making traffic stops based on race.”

Officers always say they make stops for probable cause, Ross said, and that “creative” officers can come up with one.

How can a driver say he wasn’t lane straddling? he asked. “Probable cause for a traffic stop could be a vehicle code violation, speed, traffic signals, seat belts.”

Mexican American comedian Paul Rodriguez used to joke: “I grew up in a neighborhood where a primer spot was probable cause.”

But it is no joke to law-abiding black and brown drivers who say they are stopped for no reason other than their race.

Court Opinion Cites Widespread Problem

“We do not know exactly how often this happens to African American men and women who are not celebrities and whose brushes with the police are not deemed newsworthy,” federal Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in a unanimous 1996 opinion upholding a judgment against two Santa Monica police officers who arrested two black men at gunpoint. “It is clear, however, that African Americans are stopped by the police in disproportionate numbers.”

Inglewood High School teacher Anthony Clark, 39, said he and his son Anthony, 19, have been stopped so many times that “there is no way I can give you a number.”

“Any time you see a police car behind you, if you are a black youth, you’re going to get stopped,” he said. “No doubt about it.”

Because he and his son have been stopped so many times, Clark’s Jeep now sports a custom-made license plate holder reading: “D.W.B. (Driving While Black) Is Not Illegal!”

Former Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams told a criminal justice symposium in Virginia on Tuesday that he was pulled over on his way home late one night when he was a Philadelphia police captain. The officer who pulled him over and demanded to see his driver’s license could give no reason for stopping him, Williams said.

The difficulty in establishing that police officers make racially based traffic stops is that the evidence, though abundant, is practically all anecdotal, critics of the alleged practice say.

Perhaps the best support for the contention that officers stop motorists based on race comes from data collected in 1996 along Interstate 95 north of Baltimore.

Although African Americans were only 17% of the drivers observed violating traffic laws on that portion of the highway, they were nearly 73% of those stopped.

No state has legislation requiring the compilation of hard data that would show whether there is a problem.

After Murray was stopped in June, he introduced a bill that would require the state Department of Justice to record the race and ethnicity of drivers along with the reason for all traffic stops in California. Such numbers could determine whether police pull over minority drivers without cause more often than they stop whites, he said.

Murray’s bill passed, but Gov. Pete Wilson vetoed it, saying it would cost too much time, money and manpower while offering “no certain or useful conclusion.”

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) had introduced a similar bill in Congress earlier this year, but it died in the Senate. Murray said he plans to reintroduce his bill when the Legislature reconvenes in December.

“I’m sure the numbers will show that this is a problem,” he said. “I think the officers have to know that if you look at someone and see they are black, that’s not probable cause.”

In response to the governor’s veto, the ACLU set up a toll-free hotline for California motorists to report their experiences if they feel they were stopped because of their race or color.

When the hotline number, (877)-DWB-STOP ([877]-392-7867), was announced on a Los Angeles newscast last month, so many calls came in during the first three minutes the system shut down, said Michelle Alexander, director of the ACLU of Northern California’s Racial Justice Project.

She said the hotline will continue for about a year, and that the incidents being reported are not isolated.

“These incidents show a pattern and practice,” she said. “If you have a white and black driver, both with expired tags, the white person will be ticketed. The black person will be detained for 45 minutes and asked if their car can be searched.”

Robert L. Wilkins, a Harvard-educated African American attorney, endured just such a search on I-95 in Maryland while returning with relatives from his grandfather’s funeral in 1992.

Wilkins never agreed to the search of his rental car, but the state trooper called in a K9 unit to conduct it over his protest, said Reginald T. Shuford, an ACLU attorney.

Wilkins and his relatives had to endure the “humiliating experience” of standing in the rain for 45 minutes during the search before being given a speeding ticket--a citation he had requested at the very beginning of the incident, Shuford said.

Wilkins sued and his attorneys found a written Maryland State Police policy that identified African Americans as those who would fit a profile of primary drug couriers, Shuford said.

“That became the smoking gun in his lawsuit,” Shuford said. The suit was settled, with one condition calling for the Maryland State Police to monitor traffic stops by race.

“Despite the lawsuit, despite the fact that traffic stops were being monitored and that the information had to be made available to the ACLU and the federal court, the pattern of race-based traffic stops has continued,” Shuford said.

Statistics compiled by ACLU observers showed that more than 93% of drivers on I-95 north of Baltimore were violating traffic laws such as speed limits, he said. Nearly 74% of those drivers were white and 17% black. But nearly 73% of those stopped were black, he said.

The percentage of searches of blacks and other minorities by individual officers was even more telling, Shuford said. All of one officer’s searches were of black motorists. More than 70% of the searches conducted by nine other officers were of blacks.

“Sometimes I think they are unaware that what they are doing is illegal and racist,” Shuford said. “Sometimes there is also an institutional arrogance where they continue to do it.”

Such stops leave all too many black and brown drivers with an abiding resentment of police.

Traces of Earthly’s anger and humiliation resurface as he recalls the 1994 incident when he faced Beverly Hills officers whose guns were drawn.

As he parked in a lot near Santa Monica Boulevard and Roxbury Drive, he said, officers in an unmarked car pulled up and one ordered: “Put up your hands. . . . If you move, I’ll shoot you.”

When Earthly asked what he had done wrong, he said one officer told him: “You saw us behind you. Why didn’t you stop?”

Earthly, 32, said he had not seen their unmarked car, but the officer countered, “Yes you did. We’ve been tailing you.”

The officers then asked Earthly what he was doing in the area. “They wanted to know the address of the doctor where I had an appointment,” he said.

Earthly told them that he worked at All Saints Episcopal Church, barely a block away, but the questions kept coming:

“Who is the pastor of All Saints?” he said they asked.

“I told them the rector was Carol Anderson,” he said.

Apparently unaware that a rector is equivalent to a pastor, the officer again asked the name of the “pastor,” Earthly said. They then decided to let Earthly go on to his appointment--but, he said, with a warning: “You need to watch how you drive in Beverly Hills.”

He is one of nine people, including Murray, who have filed federal lawsuits that their attorney--former Beverly Hills Mayor Robert Tanenbaum--hopes to have certified as a class action.

Beverly Hills police referred questions on the suit to a private attorney who could not be reached for comment Thursday.

In a sworn statement filed with Earthly’s suit, the Rev. Anderson said Beverly Hills City Manager Mark Scott had told her that Earthly is very credible, the stops were wrong and that “the Beverly Hills Police Department is a state within a state over which I have no control.”

All Saints parish administrator Jean Williamson said she was present during that conversation and filed her own sworn declaration supporting Anderson’s account.

Scott said he did find Earthly credible. “But so are the two officers,” he said. “I never said at any time the Police Department is a state within a state over which I have no control. By simple definition, a city manager certainly has control over a police department. The police chief reports to me.”

Whites Don’t Believe in Race-Based Stops

A fundamental difficulty in coming to grips with race-based police stops is that many whites simply do not believe they happen, Murray said.

“I have talked to some relatively sincere white folks who just really think that there really isn’t this kind of racism anymore,” he said.

He said he has asked those people--reporters, elected officials, ordinary citizens--to ask black and brown people they know or work with about the problem. One Sacramento television reporter did that, he said, and later told Murray that every black person he spoke to had experienced a humiliating traffic stop they felt was racially based.

Some whites are willing to turn a blind eye to such practices because they see such stops as the price of “keeping their cities safe,” Murray said.

“But no one is going to let this issue go,” he said. “I’m not going to. The ACLU is not going to. This has reached a critical mass. It is moving forward to some conclusion--one way or the other.”