Racial Profiling Persists in N.J.

It was a drizzly night on the New Jersey Turnpike when state troopers pulled over a van carrying four men--three blacks and one Latino--headed to a basketball clinic.

What should have been an uneventful speeding stop turned violent when the driver accidentally shifted the car into reverse. Troopers fired 11 shots into the van, wounding three passengers and further inflaming the bitter conflict over racial profiling in New Jersey.

The 1998 shooting on one of the nation’s busiest highways has led to a $12.95-million settlement for the four men, prosecution of two white troopers and a vow by New Jersey leaders to reduce the disproportionate number of minorities pulled over by police. But during recent hearings, law enforcement officials made a galling admission: After years of wrestling with the issue the statistics are virtually unchanged.

“It’s clear we have not solved the problem,” state Atty. Gen. John Farmer said. While minorities average 30% of turnpike traffic, he noted, they account for 78% of those stopped and searched by police.

Insisting that change will come, Farmer conceded the latest numbers are “extremely troubling.” New evidence, he said, suggests that when police search drivers on the turnpike, they find drugs, weapons and other contraband more commonly among white motorists.

‘The White Man’s Pass’ or ‘The Black Dragon’?

The racial profiling controversy has ensnared some of New Jersey’s top leaders, embarrassing former Gov. Christie Whitman and sparking an impeachment movement against Associate Supreme Court Justice Peter G. Verniero.

It also has cast a bad light on the gritty, 148-mile New Jersey Turnpike, a high-speed artery that roars past refineries and toxic lagoons near New York City, hits suburban sprawl midway and ends amid vast stretches of rural open space at the Delaware border. Romanticized by Chuck Berry, Bruce Springsteen and Paul Simon, the 50-year-old highway has been dubbed “the white man’s pass” by black motorists and “the black dragon” by state troopers.

Federal agents call it one of the main routes for drug trafficking between Florida and New York, and while few doubt the need to halt turnpike smuggling, many residents challenge state troopers’ methods and results.

“This makes us look like we’re part of the Deep South,” said David Rebovich, a political science professor at Rider University in Lawrence Township, N.J. “And the irony is that many people here think they’re so very progressive. They all want to know why this problem continues.”

The answers are varied, reflecting the complex dialogue about race and criminal justice that bedevils the country as a whole. New Jersey, which has publicly grappled with the problem more than any other state, has no shortage of solutions--and excuses.

Give us more time, says Farmer and other politicians, insisting that profiling is a management problem. Yet many state troopers continue to deny that a problem exists, saying they have never used race as the sole basis for stopping a motorist. The essentially unchanged statistics, they contend, speak for themselves.

“A lot of people don’t want to accept this,” said Ed Lennon, president of the New Jersey State Troopers Fraternal Assn. “It just may be that our troopers are arresting people for very sound reasons.”

Others contend that the actions of state troopers have been tainted by their alliance with the Drug Enforcement Administration’s “Operation Pipeline.” Under the 1980s program, New Jersey and other states enforced a zero tolerance crackdown on major highways. The DEA drafted guidelines singling out minority drivers, noting that Chinese, West African and Nigerian, Pakistani, Indian and Colombian couriers were the largest “visible heroin trafficking groups.” Agency guidelines also noted that because “blacks value material goods, blacks who are not able to purchase their own home put money into cars.”

It would be unrealistic to expect troopers to “unlearn” these lessons overnight, said David Harris, a national expert on racial profiling and a law professor at the University of Toledo in Ohio. “This problem goes very deep into the past.”

So deep, some say, that New Jersey must confront fundamental issues in the American psyche before it can solve the profiling problem. The practice reflects racial attitudes that are ingrained years before a trooper takes his first spin on the turnpike, said Col. Carson Dunbar, the state police superintendent.

Some critics grudgingly give the state credit. “At least New Jersey is struggling with this,” said Deborah Jacobs, executive director of the state’s American Civil Liberties Union. “In most other states, the real conversation about profiling hasn’t even begun.”

For nearly a decade, however, New Jersey officials discounted growing evidence that racial profiling was a problem. In a watershed 1995 case, a state court ruled that troopers had halted minority motorists on the southern end of the turnpike solely because of their race. A judge found that drug and weapon evidence was inadmissible in court against 17 defendants who alleged they were unfairly targeted by officers.

The state appealed but dramatically shifted course after the April 23, 1998, turnpike shooting of Leroy Jarmaine Grant, Danny Reyes, Keshon Moore and Rayshawn Brown, all in their 20s and from New York City. “The police and politicians knew they were in for a tough time when they searched the van and found no guns or drugs,” said Peter Neufeld, a lawyer who, along with Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. and Barry Scheck, represented the four men.

“These kids were headed to basketball tryouts in North Carolina. . . . They all came from good homes and their parents were absolutely furious.”

Troopers John Hogan and James Kenna said they acted in self-defense.

The officers reported that they pulled the minivan over for speeding. As they approached, the van lurched backward, knocking Hogan to the ground, said Bob Galantucci, Hogan’s attorney. Kenna, believing his partner was in danger, fired into the vehicle, as did Hogan, the lawyer said.

But a forensic investigation cast doubts on the troopers’ accounts, prosecutors said. Police investigators and witnesses said the van had been moving slowly in reverse, was not a threat to either officer and that it was unlikely Hogan had been knocked down as he claimed.

Kenna faces trial for attempted murder, and both troopers have been charged with aggravated assault. A separate grand jury indictment charged the two men with falsifying records of past turnpike encounters to cover up that they had stopped a disproportionate number of minorities. Their trial is set for Sept. 4.

Despite the high-profile prosecutions and promised police reforms, the political fallout continues.

The racial-profiling controversy was considered a factor in Whitman’s surprise decision last year not to seek election to the U.S. Senate. The former governor, who now heads the Environmental Protection Agency, also was embarrassed by the release of a 1996 photo that caught her smiling as she frisked an innocent black man during a drug sweep in Camden. Months after the shooting, Verniero--who was Whitman’s attorney general and a nominee for a vacancy on the New Jersey Supreme Court--joined his boss in denouncing racial profiling.

But he has come under attack in the state Legislature in recent months, as many Democrats and Republicans allege that he tried to cover up the extent of the problem during earlier testimony. Verniero has denied the charges and appears to have won his battle to stave off impeachment.

In 1999, New Jersey law enforcement officials dropped years of opposition to a federal probe and agreed to a consent decree that monitors their efforts to curb profiling. The reforms are a start, critics say, but many point out that racial justice is in the eye of the beholder--and that people view the turnpike with radically different eyes.

History of Associating Black Men With Drugs

Lennon, the head of the state troopers association, said he opposes racial profiling. He recalled that, as a young officer in the early 1980s, “the arrests we made quite often happened to be black males from down South. Not every time, but when [officers] came in with large amounts of cocaine and heroin, it always seemed to be black men traveling southbound out of the Lincoln Tunnel, down to the Carolinas.”

Men who looked like Grant, Moore, Brown and Reyes. Men who took the same route down the turnpike. When he addressed a Senate panel, Dunbar made that point by quoting the Talmud: “We do not see things the way they are. We see things the way we are.”