RECORDS: N.J. STATE POLICE TARGETED MINORITY DRIVERS

The state attorney general says routine racial profiling evolved amid the
'80s drug war.

TRENTON, N.J. -- At least eight of every 10 automobile searches carried out
by state troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike over most of the past decade
were conducted on vehicles with minority drivers, state documents have
revealed.

The figures, contained in 91,000 pages of internal state records distributed
Monday by the state Attorney General's Office, showed that a systematic
process of racial profiling became a routine part of state police
operations, Attorney General John Farmer said.

The documents released by Farmer were among those being sought by lawyers
representing minority drivers who are suing the state, claiming racial
discrimination.

=46armer explained that the practice of singling out black and Hispanic
drivers evolved as part of the drug war of the mid-1980s, when the federal
Drug Enforcement Administration began asking local police to intercept
narcotics traffickers on major highways.

=46armer said the policy had some success as a crime-fighting tool. He said
30 percent of the searches of cars turned up some kind of contraband, while
70 percent turned up nothing improper.

But even as such race-based tactics helped the New Jersey State Police
arrest drug smugglers, the agency's methods inflicted a terrible price on
the state's minority residents, Farmer said, as troopers discriminated
against thousands of black and Hispanic drivers who were stopped and
searched solely because of their skin color.

"The effect of that kind of ratio over 10 years is devastating," =46armer
said. "This may have been effective in law enforcement terms, but as social
policy it was a disaster."

=46armer, who became attorney general 17 months ago, said he was releasing
the documents as a way to "pay a debt to the past" and try to rebuild public
confidence in the force. But he also defended the actions of previous
attorneys general, saying the law regarding profiling was muddled, and that
many of the drug interdiction policies that encouraged profiling were taught
by the DEA and the federal Department of Transportation.

Even today, Farmer said, there is conflicting case law regarding when it is
permissible for an officer to consider race in deciding to stop a driver. He
praised Gov. Christie Whitman for making New Jersey the first state to take
sweeping measures to stop racial profiling.

=46armer's words and the release of the documents did little to quiet many
civil rights activists, however. The Rev. Reginald T. Jackson, executive
director of the New Jersey Black Ministers Council, said the Whitman
administration ignored complaints for years, and only acted after three
unarmed minority men were shot by two troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike in
April 1998. He called for a change in the state Constitution to make the
Attorney General's Office an elected office. Under the state's current
Constitution, adopted in 1947, the attorney general is appointed by the
governor.

"Right now the attorney general is not going to do anything that the person
who appointed him is opposed to," Jackson said. "He is not the people's
lawyer, he is the governor's lawyer. Who do the people go to?"

The documents are also likely to intensify the criticism of the governor's
longtime political ally, Justice Peter Verniero of the state Supreme Court,
who was attorney general from 1996 to 1998.

During public hearings before his confirmation to the state's high court in
1999, Verniero testified that he had had no detailed knowledge of any
statistical evidence of profiling until the Attorney General's Office
conducted its own review of the state police in 1999.

But one memo from an assistant attorney general to Verniero, dated July 29,
1997, included an audit of the Moorestown Barracks, which had been the
subject of repeated complaints of racial profiling. The audit showed that
minorities, who make up 13.5 percent of the drivers on the New Jersey
Turnpike, accounted for more than 33 percent of the traffic stops.

During his sworn testimony before the state Senate, Verniero also insisted
that he had worked co-operatively with the U.S. Department of Justice, which
was conducting a civil rights investigation of the profiling allegations.
But a memo from a May 20, 1997, meeting, at which Verniero and his
assistants discussed their response to the federal investigation, also
contains handwritten notes that indicate that Verniero was adamantly opposed
to entering into a consent decree and allowing a federal monitor to oversee
the department. The notes, which are thought to have been written by an
assistant attorney general, say that Verniero declared that before he'd sign
a consent decree "they'd tie me to a train and drag me along the track."

By 1997, for instance, the department's own internal audits found that in
some barracks members of minority groups accounted for 80 percent or more of
all searches. The investigation by the Attorney General's Office and the
Justice Department found that such results were common throughout the state.

In one of the harshest assessments of the force, Deputy Director Debra L.
Stone of the Department of Law and Public Safety wrote in =46ebruary 1999
that discrimination was so deeply ingrained in state police culture that
veteran troopers acted as "coaches" and taught profiling tactics to rookies.

"Trooper after trooper has testified that coach taught them how to profile
minorities," Stone wrote. "The coaches also teach this to minority
troopers."

Stone's memo said that the troopers also went to great lengths to cover each
others' misdeeds, and that after the April 1998 turnpike shooting, troopers
brought in a drug-sniffing dog in hopes that it might find evidence to
justify the stop and the gunfire. No contraband was found.

William Buckman, a lawyer who argued the Gloucster County case, said that he
was stunned that many of the documents released Monday were denied to
lawyers who requested them five years ago.

"There seems to be only one reason to withhold all of this: to conceal from
the public how high up in the Attorney General's Office people were aware of
the length and the breadth of the problem," Buckman said. "And the striking
thing even today, is that when you read these documents, you get no sense of
urgency, no sense of outrage that people were being harassed because of
their race, and it must be stopped no matter what."

Whitman, who was attending a conference in California, released a written
statement praising Farmer for releasing the documents.

"While racial profiling did not begin in this state or under this
administration, history will show that the end of racial profiling in
America did indeed begin in New Jersey and under this administration," she
said.

The political furor surrounding the issue is almost certain to continue. The
state Senate Judiciary committee, which is investigating the issue, plans to
take sworn statements from a wide range of state officials and may hold
public hearings early next year.