SURVEY EXPLORES PERVASIVENESS OF RACIAL PROFILING

More than half of all black men report that they've been victims of racial
profiling by police, according to a survey by the Washington Post, the
Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University.

Overall, 37 percent of blacks said they've been unfairly stopped by police
because they were black, including 52 percent of black men and 25 percent
of black women.

Blacks aren't the only Americans who say they've been the targets of racial
or ethnic profiling by law enforcement. One in five Latino and Asian men
reported being victims of racially motivated police stops.

Racial profiling is only one of many examples of discrimination that
minorities say they confront. More than a third of all blacks interviewed
said they've been rejected for a job or failed to win a promotion because
of their race. One in five Latinos and Asians also said they've been
discriminated against in the workplace because of their race or ethnicity.

Overwhelming majorities of blacks, Latinos and Asians also report they
occasionally experience at least one of the following expressions of
prejudice: poor service in stores or restaurants, disparaging comments, and
encounters with people who they believe were frightened or suspicious of
them because of their race or ethnicity.

"These are precisely the kinds of incidents that contribute to what is
coming to be called black middle-class rage -- the steady occurrence of
slights and put-downs you know in your gut are tied to race but that rarely
take the form of blatant racism," said Lawrence Bobo, professor of
sociology at Harvard University. "No one uses the 'N-word', there is not a
flat denial of service. It is insidious, recurrent, lesser treatment."

A much smaller proportion of whites also say they're victims of
discrimination: One out of every three reported that they sometimes face
racial slurs, bad service or disrespectful behavior.

Claims and counterclaims about the prevalence of racial profiling have been
made for years. But there have been few reliable attempts to estimate the
degree to which blacks, Latinos and Asian-Americans believe they have been
the victims of the practice.

For this survey, the latest in a series of polls on public-policy issues
conducted by the Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard
University researchers, 1,709 randomly selected adults were interviewed by
telephone from March 8 through April 22. The sample included 315 Latinos,
323 blacks and 254 Asian-Americans.

The margin of sampling error for the overall results was plus or minus
three percentage points, and plus or minus six points for the black
subsample, seven points for Latinos and nine points for Asian-Americans.

Widely publicized incidents around the country have drawn attention to the
targeting of minorities by police, a practice some police officials have
defended by arguing that minority-group members are more likely to commit
crimes. President Bush told Congress in February that "it is wrong, and we
must end it."

Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., and Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., recently
introduced bills in the Senate and the House that would withhold funding
from agencies that engage in racial profiling.