AN IDEA ABOUT RACE AND A WAR ON DRUGS WENT HAND IN HAND

The File On Racial Profiling

Until last year, no governor or State Police superintendent had ever
acknowledged racial profiling occurred under his or her watch.

But the documents released yesterday show that over the past 15 years the
top ranks of state government whipsawed between zealous attempts to stop
drug trafficking and concerns that their tactics were unfair to minorities.

Attorney General John Farmer Jr. acknowledged that despite periodic efforts
to end police practices that targeted minorities, state officials had never
been able to root them out. Even an explicit ban on racial profiling in
1990, and the dismissal of 20 troopers in 1992, failed to eradicate the
practice, he said.

"The department acknowledged abuse and tried to address it," Farmer said
yesterday. Yet each time the issue soon resurfaced.

Interviews with former governors and State Police superintendents traced
the problem to a stepped-up war on drugs in the late 1980s.

The state's 1987 Uniform Drug Reform Act, an aggressive attorney general,
and Operation Pipeline, a federal initiative to snatch drug couriers off
major highways, put state troopers on the front line of the burgeoning war
against drugs.

"The real problem came under the tenure of Cary Edwards," said Col. Clinton
L. Pagano, referring to the attorney general who assumed the post in 1986,
late in Pagano's 14-year run as State Police superintendent. "We were under
tremendous public pressure, people demonstrating in the streets: Get drugs
off the streets."

Troopers' drug arrests shot upward from just over 4,000 in 1985 to more
than 10,000 arrests each year in 1988 and 1989, Pagano's last years in charge.

Even as the arrest tally rose, so did complaints from minority leaders and
drivers that they were being unfairly targeted as suspected drug runners.

Tom Kean, who was governor at the time, says he cannot recall the issue of
racial profiling coming up during his terms in office.

But in 1996, in a landmark case that helped push the issue of racial
profiling to national prominence, a Superior Court judge in Gloucester
County concluded that the troopers Pagano sent out to intercept drugs on
the southern reaches of the New Jersey Turnpike had engaged in racial
profiling.

Pagano disputes the notion of a systemic problem.

"If they look deeply enough into what was done during my tenure, they'll
see that where there was a factual basis, action was taken and it was
handled as best it could have been handled at the time," he said recently.

In 1990, a new governor, Jim Florio, and a new State Police superintendent,
Justin J. Dintino, set out to end the problem. On his first day in office
that February, Dintino published new search procedures that specifically
outlawed targeting drivers based on their race or other physical appearances.

"I said I didn't care if we didn't make one drug arrest; I didn't want to
violate anyone's constitutional rights," Dintino said recently. "Racial
profiling was all but eliminated."

Drug arrests also plummeted.

From the 1989 arrest total of 10,126, the number of State Police drug
arrests plunged to 5,762 in 1990, and to 4,427 the following year.

Florio, who appointed Dintino, said African-American ministers had alerted
him to the problem of racial profiling even as he was coming into office.
Later, he said, the American Civil Liberties Union told him there had been
a drop in profiling complaints in the six months after Dintino's policies
were put into place.

Dintino said the improper focus on minorities arose simply because troopers
told one another the best way to boost their arrest rates was to target
minorities. And records show that awards and promotions often were based on
arrest statistics.

"The troopers know where they're going to get the most action. The troopers
know minorities are involved in transporting drugs on the highway more than
whites," Dintino said. "As far as who was smuggling drugs, it's no secret:
The Colombians were involved in smuggling drugs into this country and then
you have a lot of black organized crime gangs who push the drugs in the
urban areas."

But that didn't justify profiling, Dintino said. "I took measures to stop
it. It's illegal. It's not right. You're violating people's constitutional
rights."

Dintino's successor, career-long State Trooper Carl Williams, was selected
by Gov. Christie Whitman specifically to restore sagging morale. At
Williams' swearing-in in June 1994, Whitman said, "The troopers have
someone who really believes in them."

Throughout his tenure, as the issue of racial profiling rose to greater and
greater prominence, Williams repeatedly defended the integrity of the troopers.

In March 1996, after Superior Court Judge Robert E. Francis determined
racial profiling had occurred on the Turnpike and dismissed charges against
17 motorists, Williams sent a teletype to troopers saying, "I strongly
disagree with the judge's rulings and assertions."

"The division of State Police will continue to support troopers who do
their jobs in a lawful manner," the teletype concluded. "Do your job
correctly and this office, in conjunction with the Attorney General's
Office, will always provide the legal representation required to defend our
members."

In the February 1999 interview that ended up costing him his job, Williams
staunchly denied there was a system of profiling among troopers. But he
also laid out connections between various ethnic groups and particular
elements of the illegal drug trade. The Governor said those comments
undermined the state's efforts to eliminate racial profiling, and she
demanded Williams' resignation.

Two months later, Whitman's attorney general, Peter Verniero, released a
landmark report in which the state acknowledged that troopers engaged in
racial profiling.

"Upon becoming aware that racial profiling was being practiced by some
members of the State Police, Governor Whitman became the first governor in
the nation to admit racial profiling existed," Whitman's spokesman Pete
McDonough said. "And the first governor in the nation to do something about
it."

Staff writer David Kinney contributed to this report.