LAW-ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES DO SOME SOUL-SEARCHING OVER RACIAL PROFILING

A troubling self-portrait has emerged a year after hundreds of police
agencies began investigating the use of racial profiling by their
officers, and a growing number of departments are responding with
policies to discourage harassment of innocent minority travelers. In
Washington, the State Patrol plans to use its data to question and
discipline individual troopers whose records suggest racial
profiling. Former Chief Annette Sandberg also canceled awards for
drug arrests, saying they may encourage troopers to use profiles
instead of focusing on hazardous drivers, thus rewarding "the wrong
kind of behavior."

In San Diego, city police have hired academic consultants and plan to
convene focus groups to try to understand why officers stop and
search black and Hispanic drivers at rates far higher than white
drivers.

And last month, the California Highway Patrol (CHP) declared a
six-month moratorium on consent searches, the focus of a class-action
lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which says the
searches disproportionately target minorities. Troopers must now
develop probable cause of criminal activity before searching a
vehicle instead of relying on driver consent.

Some officers think "we're giving up the store" by voluntarily
halting consent searches, said CHP Commissioner D.O. "Spike" Helmick.
"But it's incumbent upon us to stand back and look at what we're
doing."

The U.S. Customs Service appears to be the first agency to
significantly reduce the number of minorities searched for
contraband. After enacting far-reaching reforms that include
requiring supervisory approval for every intrusive search, Customs
slashed body searches by nearly 80 percent at the nation's airports
from 1998 to 2000 and has increased drug seizures by 38 percent since
1999.

Long accused of inappropriately targeting black and Hispanic air
passengers, Customs is providing strong evidence, analysts say, that
good police work can spare minority travelers the indignity of
criminal suspicion.

Meanwhile, numerous police chiefs nationwide have been genuinely
troubled by the portraits their data paint. And many are proving
willing to probe deeper.

"Some departments are still saying, 'No, we're not doing it,' even
though the numbers show something different. But a fair number of
departments are now saying, 'This is something that undercuts our
ability to serve all of our clients, and we want to know what's going
on and what to do about it,' " said John Lamberth, a psychology
professor at Temple University and a leading analyst of racially
biased police practices.

Keeping Track

Racial profiling emerged as a national concern after widely
publicized incidents indicating that police use ethnicity and skin
color to make law-enforcement decisions. A recent Washington Post
survey found that more than half of black men and one in five
Hispanic and Asian men say they've been victims of racially biased
policing.

In February, President Bush told Congress that racial profiling "is
wrong, and we must end it." At least 13 states have passed laws
requiring police to collect traffic-stop data. The Clinton
administration ordered a variety of federal agencies to keep similar
data.

At least eight agencies are collecting data by order of a federal
court or under agreement with the U.S. Justice Department. Among
them: the Montgomery County (Md.) police, Maryland State Police and
New Jersey State Police, which brought the profiling debate to a boil
in April 1998 when two troopers opened fire on a van carrying four
unarmed black and Hispanic men on the New Jersey Turnpike.

In all, about 400 of the nation's 18,000 police agencies are
collecting data, according to researchers at Boston's Northeastern
University. About half have completed their first reports, said Amy
Farrell of Northeastern's Center for Criminal Justice Policy Research.

Regardless of what the numbers show, the "overwhelming conclusion"
has been that "we don't have a problem," Farrell said.

Many police remain deeply wary of data collection, arguing that
statistics fuel allegations of racism without offering clear
solutions. No one has devised a satisfactory method for identifying
the racial makeup of a patrolled population, making it difficult to
interpret the data.

Among the skeptics is Maryland State Police Superintendent David
Mitchell. In 1995, an ACLU lawsuit forced the Maryland police to
become the first major department in the nation to collect data on
traffic stops.

Since then, Mitchell has enacted reforms that have cut searches of
minority drivers. But he has refused to address lingering questions
about why cars driven by minorities still make up more than 60
percent of vehicle searches on Interstate 95, dismissing the numbers
as a reflection of the broader reality that minorities are more often
arrested for crimes.

"The issue of race is easy to raise and, frankly, hard to defend
against," Mitchell said. "This is not a perfect world. Our numbers
are never going to be perfect."

That attitude is still common in the law-enforcement community.
What's different now is a vanguard of "smart departments" taking
action to improve their statistics, Farrell and others said.

Customs Steps In

The U.S. Customs Service is leading the pack.

"There's no doubt about it: They're doing a better job," said Ed Fox,
a lawyer who represents 90 black women who sued Customs after being
frisked or more in 1997 and 1998 at Chicago's O'Hare International
Airport. "They've stopped picking on the people who don't carry
drugs."

The transformation began in the late 1990s, after a spate of lawsuits
accused Customs inspectors of singling out minority air passengers,
particularly women, for strip-searches. The most notorious case
involved Amanda Buritica, a Hispanic school-crossing guard from Port
Chester, N.Y., who was stopped in San Francisco on her way home from
Hong Kong.

Buritica was handcuffed, transferred to a hospital and forced to
swallow powerful laxatives that caused her to move her bowels 28
times. No drugs were found. After 25 hours, Buritica was released
without so much as an apology.

Customs has broad constitutional authority to defend the nation's
borders, including the power to search anyone and anything entering
the country. Top officials were largely unconcerned by cases like
Buritica's, said Raymond Kelly, then Customs commissioner.

"Their feeling was: 'Hey, it's a legal deal. We're winning the
lawsuits,' " Kelly said in an interview. "My response was: 'Yes,
you're winning the lawsuits, but you're abusing U.S. citizens. ' "

Kelly ordered inspectors to begin keeping detailed records on
passenger searches, which were delivered to him each morning. Then he
used the threat of a congressional inquiry into allegations of racial
profiling, looming in May 1999, to persuade officials to adopt
far-reaching reforms.

No longer could inspectors touch anyone without a supervisor's
approval. If there was reason to believe a passenger had swallowed
drugs, only the port director could authorize removal to a medical
facility.

Port directors were ordered to consult a lawyer before approving
X-rays or monitored bowel movements and to reassess detentions every
few hours.

Kelly also made it more difficult to justify searches. He banned a
list of 80 triggers that branded virtually anyone a potential drug
courier, including passengers who were uncooperative or too
cooperative, nervous or too calm, wearing sunglasses or bulky
clothing.

"If you're stopping a disproportionate number of minorities, there
may be good reasons for it. But they have to be articulated," Kelly
said. "People should not be searched just because of a vague notion
in some inspector's head."

Finally, Kelly acted to make searches less intimidating. Inspectors
must now disclose reasons for the search, offer to call relatives if
detention lasts more than two hours, pay for hotels and missed
flights, and give searched passengers a comment card pre-addressed to
Customs headquarters.

At first, inspectors were wary. Searches - and drug seizures -
plunged. But inspectors soon realized Kelly was not trying to
identify scapegoats, said Robert Meekins, deputy port director at
John F. Kennedy International Airport.

The result: Pat downs, X-rays and other body searches dropped from
more than 40,000 in 1998 to fewer than 10,000 last year. Seizures of
drugs and contraband rose from 4 percent of searches in 1998 to
nearly 18 percent so far this year.

Minorities still account for more than two-thirds of searches, a fact
that may never change, Kelly said. Flights from Jamaica, Colombia,
Africa and the Caribbean produce the vast majority of drug seizures,
and those flights tend to be packed with black and Hispanic
travelers, Customs officials said.

But compared with 1998, nearly 16,000 fewer black and Hispanic
travelers were physically accosted last year, according to Customs.