STUDIES FIND RACE DISPARITIES IN TEXAS TRAFFIC STOPS

HOUSTON, Oct. 6 - Black and Hispanic motorists across Texas are more than
twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to be searched during traffic stops
while black drivers in certain rural areas of the state are also far more
likely to be ticketed, according to two studies examining possible racial
profiling.

The investigations by the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People and by The Dallas Morning News were released this week and
brought an immediate challenge from the Texas Department of Public Safety.
State officials described the Morning News study as flawed, citing other
statistics in denying that the agency practiced racial profiling.

The investigations were undertaken after complaints in Texas and other states.

Gary Bledsoe, state president of the N.A.A.C.P., said he believed that the
two reports proved that minority drivers were singled out by many law
enforcement officers. "The data are very clear," said Mr. Bledsoe, an
Austin lawyer who said he had been stopped but not ticketed nearly 20 times
during the past decade. "This is a clear indication of racial profiling.
It's definitely happening."

The two studies used the same raw data but focused on different time
periods and used different experts to tabulate the numbers. The studies
centered on two fundamental issues: the number of minorities ticketed and
the number of minorities searched during traffic stops.

The Morning News, which published its investigation on Wednesday, examined
roughly 895,000 traffic tickets written by state troopers last year. The
figures were analyzed by a University of Texas mathematics professor.

Looking at the state as a whole, the newspaper concluded that blacks and
Hispanics received tickets at rates that actually were proportional to
their driving-age populations. But disparities emerged when the study
examined different regions of the state. In many rural counties blacks were
nearly twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to be ticketed. Of the 193
counties analyzed, blacks received more tickets than expected in 84
counties. There were some counties where whites received a
higher-than-expected number of tickets, but in those cases the disparity
was not as great.

James B. Francis, board chairman of the Department of Public Safety, said
the Morning News analysis was flawed because it compared the race and
number of ticketed drivers with the local population where the stop
occurred. But, he said, it did not consider that the drivers might be from
elsewhere. "I'm not going to start a massive investigation unless and until
there is some indication that something is going on," Mr. Francis said.

On Tuesday, Mr. Bledsoe released the N.A.A.C.P. findings at a news
conference in Austin. The report, prepared by two professors of economics
and statistics, analyzed 65,000 traffic stops from March and found that
blacks were searched twice as often as non-Hispanic whites while Hispanics
were searched two and a half times as often. The study also concluded that
search rates were even higher for minority males with Hispanic men four
times as likely as non-Hispanic whites to be searched and black men two and
a half times as likely.

Mike Cox, a public safety spokesman, declined to comment and steered any
questions to a report about traffic stops posted this week on the agency's
Web site. In March, the department began collecting data on traffic stops,
requesting that officers collect information like a driver's race and sex.
The initiative began after the public safety department suspended seven
officers in East Texas for racial insensitivity. After this incident, Mr.
Francis, the board chairman, declared there would be "zero tolerance" for
discrimination within the ranks.

The statistics on the internal report, which are based on five months of
data from this year, reveal two primary findings, one suggesting that
racial profiling does not occur and the other suggesting that it does.
First, the state report found that non-Hispanic whites constituted a higher
rate of overall traffic stops (68.12 percent) than their estimated
statewide population (60.69 percent). Blacks and Hispanics, the report
states, are actually stopped at lower rates than their overall populations.

But the state statistics also show that blacks and Hispanics are twice as
likely as non-Hispanic whites to be searched during stops, a finding
similar to those of the N.A.A.C.P. and The Morning News. The state report
explained the high number of Hispanics who were searched as a byproduct of
the traffic of illegal immigrants and drugs from Mexico.