N.J. Agrees to End Race Profiling by Troopers

The federal government took an unprecedented step Wednesday against the controversial practice of racial profiling, striking an agreement with the state of New Jersey to ensure that its troopers no longer use race as a factor in highway traffic stops.

U.S. Justice Department officials said that the accord should send a message to police agencies around the country that using racial or ethnic profiles in traffic or law enforcement stops--a practice that has been widely debated in recent months--will no longer be tolerated and that federal officials will use the power of the courts if necessary to stop it.

“What we hope to come out of this,” said Justice Department civil rights chief Bill Lann Lee in an interview, “is that New Jersey will emerge as a model for other law enforcement agencies in [ensuring] good management practices. . . . This makes absolutely clear that the use of race and ethnicity is not permitted in traffic stops.”

The New Jersey case marks the first time that the federal government has sought and won a formal ban on racial profiling by police, officials said. In Wednesday’s agreement, reached under the threat of protracted litigation by the Justice Department, state officials agreed to set up a multimillion-dollar training and education program on proper police procedures, establish a system for collecting racial data on stops and bring in an outside, court-appointed monitor to ensure that racial profiling is no longer used on state highways.

Civil rights activists in Los Angeles and elsewhere around the country applauded the agreement as a critical and potentially far-reaching step in their battle to make law enforcement colorblind. But police officials maintained that it could have a chilling effect on officers on the street who are simply trying to do their job.

“We don’t approve of racial profiling or the abuse of civil rights but neither do we approve of solutions like this that paint the rank-and-file police officer as the villain,” said Jim Pasco, head of the 283,000-member National Fraternal Order of Police.

“There are obviously people within the Justice Department who are intent on eroding police officers’ credibility within their communities,” Pasco said. He accused the Justice Department of using its considerable resources to “blackmail” local police agencies into concessions.

Indeed, New Jersey officials already had begun to institute on their own many of the reforms included in Wednesday’s consent decree.

But they have now agreed to make those reforms formal rather than risk litigating a complaint filed by the Justice Department alleging “a pattern or practice of conduct by troopers of the New Jersey State Police that deprives persons” of their constitutional rights.

As one New Jersey official said of the Justice Department: “They’re the 800-pound gorilla.”

Minorities have long complained that they are routinely singled out and harassed by authorities on roadways, in airports, at border stops and elsewhere simply because of the color of their skin. Blacks say that they are often guilty of nothing more than DWB--”driving while black.”

Authorities have frequently dismissed such complaints as unfounded, based largely on anecdotal evidence. Racial profiling, many say, is simply a myth. But in the last year, the issue has generated increased attention in California, Maryland, New Jersey and elsewhere in the wake of high-profile cases and new data, sparking widespread disagreement about how prevalent the problem is and what tactics police should be allowed to use.

The profiling issue became particularly divisive in New Jersey earlier this year after a two-month investigation revealed that three-fourths of the cars searched on the highways in one part of the state were driven by blacks or Latinos.

The state police superintendent was forced to resign after he suggested that certain ethnic groups dominated drug trafficking on certain highways and thus were more likely to be stopped on the highways. And prosecutors threw out several dozen cases filed against motorists stopped by two state troopers who were indicted on charges that they lied to conceal their practice of singling out minorities.

But the issue has extended far beyond New Jersey’s borders.

In Washington, President Clinton and Atty. Gen. Janet Reno recently moved to collect racial data in police stops to document the extent of what the president called a “morally indefensible, deeply corrosive practice.” And in California, about 30 police agencies have begun voluntarily tracking racial data.

Gov. Gray Davis in September vetoed a bill that would have required the California Highway Patrol and local police departments to track racial and ethnic data. Los Angeles Police Department officials have also declined to do so, saying that racial profiling is not a problem there and that data collection could put a chill on good police work.

LAPD Chief Bernard C. Parks, who is black, has said in the past that the debate over racial profiling has been hindered because the term has been ill-defined and “it means too many things to too many people.” Moreover, he said in a June interview, racial profiling may be rooted in the realities of crime, not racism.

“It’s not the fault of the police when they stop minority males or put them in jail. It’s the fault of the minority males for committing the crime,” Parks said. “In my mind it is not a great revelation that, if officers are looking for criminal activity, they’re going to look at the kind of people who are listed on crime reports.”

Carl Collins, president of the NAACP’s Beverly Hills-Hollywood chapter, said that the New Jersey agreement “is a great sign but now [federal officials] need to do something here in California.”

The pact “is certainly a big first step,” said Frank L. Berry, regional director for the NAACP’s nine Western states, based in Los Angeles. “With the Justice Department taking a position like this, it sends a message and it establishes that there’s a need to gather more information. . . . We know that it’s happening. We just don’t know how widespread it is.”

Representatives of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and police organizations met last month in Washington with Justice Department officials, including Reno, to promote a dialogue and try to hammer out a way of resolving the thorny issues surrounding racial profiling.

But Pasco of the Fraternal Order of Police said that the New Jersey agreement could hinder those negotiations, sending the message that the Justice Department will sue police over profiling if it sees fit.

Pasco said that police officers must be given the latitude to use their training and experience to spot suspicious and potentially criminal behavior, as happened successfully in the Seattle area last week when a customs inspector arrested a suspected Algerian terrorist who authorities said was carrying 130 pounds of explosives in his rented car.

“What’s happening is that there is an awful lot of sensitivity on all sides of the issue,” said Pasco. “African Americans who are stopped and have done nothing wrong assume that they were stopped because they’re African American. If I, on the other hand, were stopped under similar circumstances, the thought wouldn’t cross my mind.

“The data does not exist” to support widespread police profiling, he said. “But the suspicions and the perception certainly do.”

Steven Rosenbaum, head of the Justice Department’s special litigation section in civil rights, said there is no way of saying how the profiling problems among New Jersey state troopers compare with those of police agencies in other areas.

The problem in New Jersey “was serious enough to warrant filing a lawsuit alleging intentional discrimination,” he said. “But we look at law enforcement agencies one at a time.”