U.S. WROTE OUTLINE FOR RACE PROFILING, NEW JERSEY ARGUES

TRENTON, Nov. 28 - Weaving its way through the 91,000 pages of documents on
racial profiling released by New Jersey officials is a largely overlooked
thread in the national debate on race and crime - although states like New
Jersey have been the most egregious offenders, the textbook on singling out
minority drivers was written by the federal government.

New Jersey officials contend that the reason racial profiling is a national
problem is that it was initiated, and in many ways encouraged, by the
federal government's war on drugs. In 1986, the Drug Enforcement
Administration's Operation Pipeline enlisted police departments across the
country to search for narcotics traffickers on major highways and told
officers, to cite one example, that Latinos and West Indians dominated the
drug trade and therefore warranted extra scrutiny.

Since then, the D.E.A. and the Department of Transportation have financed
and taught an array of drug interdiction programs that emphasize the ethnic
and racial characteristics of narcotics organizations and teach the police
ways to single out cars and drivers who are smuggling.

Among the characteristics officers in Operation Pipeline have been trained
to look for: people with dreadlocks and cars with two Latino males
traveling together.

Federal officials contend that they have never taught profiling and that
police departments that use racially discriminatory tactics are misapplying
the D.E.A.'s intelligence reports. Federal officials have taken several
steps in recent years intended to measure the problem, most notably
President Clinton's 1999 executive order that any police force that
receives federal money for drug interdiction must keep track of the race of
anyone stopped, searched or arrested by officers.

But even the national American Civil Liberties Union, a persistent critic
of state policies on racial profiling, said much of the blame for the
policy fell on the Drug Enforcement Administration.

And in May 1998, as the Department of Justice was investigating whether the
New Jersey State Police needed a federal monitor to oversee its efforts to
deter profiling, Anthony J. Senneca, agent in charge of the D.E.A.'s Newark
office, wrote to state police officials to praise the troopers' methods and
effectiveness on the turnpike.

The letter singled out the exemplary work of five troopers, including John
Hogan, who one month earlier was involved in the April 1998 shootings of
three unarmed minority men on the New Jersey Turnpike, an incident that
propelled racial profiling onto the nation's political agenda.

David Harris, a University of Toledo law professor who has written
extensively about racial profiling, said that the Drug Enforcement
Administration had conveyed similar mixed messages across the country and
that results of the Operation Pipeline training had led to discrimination
in states as diverse as Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New
Mexico and Texas.

In response to that criticism, the Department of Justice's civil rights
division reviewed D.E.A. procedures, including the Operation Pipeline
training, in 1997, according to Kara Peterman, a department spokeswoman.
She declined to characterize the findings. But two other federal officials
said the Justice Department had concluded that the program was sound and
that the Drug Enforcement Administration did not encourage or teach profiling.

Civil rights advocates say the Justice Department's response stemmed from a
reluctance to criticize an agency it oversees. But New Jersey's attorney
general, John J. Farmer Jr., offers a more empathetic interpretation.

"In a lot of ways, the Justice Department in Washington has been going
through what we in New Jersey went through," Mr. Farmer said today. "The
troopers in the field were given a mixed message. On one hand, we were
training them not to take race into account. On the other hand, all the
intelligence featured race and ethnicity prominently. So what is your
average road trooper to make of all this?"

Few in law enforcement foresaw such an outcome in 1986, when Operation
Pipeline began as a way to use municipal police departments as an
aggressive force in the national crusade against drugs. The program, which
has been used to train more than 25,000 officers in 48 states, offered the
police access to Drug Enforcement Administration intelligence reports,
which included detailed descriptions of ethnic drug gangs and the cartels.

As early as 1987, however, those D.E.A. updates had been transformed into
questionable tactics in New Jersey. One 1987 state police training memo
listed the following as identifiers of possible drug couriers: Colombian
males, Hispanic males, a Hispanic male and a black male together, or a
Hispanic male and female posing as a couple.

Officially, the state police were on record as stating that racial
profiling was illegal and prohibited. But in a 1999 memo, Deputy Attorney
General Debra L. Stone said her investigation of the force found that in
the patrol cars and on the state's highways, "racial profiling exists as
part of the culture."

"There's no written policy on it," she said, "but you are taught that if
you see `Johnnies' in a `good car,' they don't belong and should be stopped."

Mr. Harris, who wrote the A.C.L.U. report titled "Driving While Black,"
said a similar pattern of official denials and de facto profiling cropped
up in many states where Operation Pipeline was embraced by local commanders.

"The D.E.A. has been the great evangelizer for racial profiling on the
highways," he said. "They had used the technique in airports to nab drug
couriers and thought this held great promise on the highways. So they
taught it to local departments, and because the D.E.A. agents weren't the
ones actually pulling over the cars, they've never been really held
accountable for it."

Drug Enforcement Administration officials emphatically dispute the notion
that they taught or encouraged unequal enforcement of the law.

Michael Chapman, a D.E.A. spokesman, said today that the agency trained
officers not to consider race when deciding whether to pull over a car and
to use it as only one of many factors when considering whether to search a
vehicle.

"We teach them that profiling is illegal and it is also bad investigative
technique," Mr. Chapman said.

Nonetheless, much of the Drug Enforcement Administration's emphasis on the
race and ethnicity of drug traffickers endures. During the last five years,
the D.E.A. has stopped distributing training videos in which all the drug
suspects have Spanish surnames. But just last year, the agency's Newark
office released the "Heroin Trends" report, which noted:

"Predominant wholesale traffickers are Colombian, followed by Dominicans,
Chinese, West African/Nigerian, Pakistani, Hispanic and Indian. Midlevels
are dominated by Dominicans, Colombians, Puerto Ricans, African-Americans
and Nigerians."

Meanwhile, federal agencies like the Department of Transportation have also
sponsored drug interdiction programs that make similar observations. And a
1998 report by Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, director of the White House Office
of National Drug Control Policy, stunned New Jersey officials because it
gave detailed breakdowns of the ethnic and racial backgrounds of sellers,
traffickers and users alike.

Hugh B. Price, president and chief executive of the National Urban League,
said today that he hoped that the public attention focused on New Jersey's
racial profiling would induce the federal government to address the causes
of racial profiling as well as the symptoms, even if part of the blame lay
within the Justice Department itself.

"These are federal civil rights that are at risk and are undermined, and we
want the federal government to put force on this issue," Mr. Price said.