RACIAL PROFILING IN MARYLAND DEFIES DEFINITION -- OR SOLUTION

Last year, Maryland state troopers searched 533 cars on Interstate 95. More
than half of the drivers were black. Ten percent were Hispanic. In all, 63
percent of drivers forced out of their cars were minorities.

The Maryland chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and more than
140 minority drivers who claim in two separate lawsuits to be victims of
racial profiling by the Maryland State Police look at the numbers and see
clear evidence of racial bias. Police officials look at the same numbers
and see nothing wrong.

Six years after the ACLU forced the Maryland State Police to become the
first major police agency in the country to collect data on highway traffic
stops, two things are clear: Maryland troopers continue to stop and search
minority drivers at rates far higher than their numbers on the highway can
explain. And the two sides are at a virtual impasse about where to go from
here.

Yesterday, Maryland became the 13th state to enact legislation addressing
racial profiling as Gov. Parris N. Glendening signed a bill that outlaws
race-based traffic stops and requires state and municipal police to record
and report the ethnicity of every motorist they pull over.

"It is simply outrageous that African Americans are being targeted for
traffic stops. We know it does happen. And under this bill, it is illegal
and it will stop," Glendening said at a bill-signing ceremony packed with
jubilant black lawmakers.

But the assertion that the new law will change police behavior is
challenged by the recent history of the Maryland State Police. And the
Maryland experience holds a harsh lesson for minorities hoping for clear
answers as hundreds of police agencies across the country begin to collect
data in an effort to ferret out racial bias.

Since 1995, under the oversight of a federal judge, the Maryland agency has
pursued a thorough campaign to combat racial profiling. It has assembled
one of the most comprehensive statistical portrait of highway stops of any
police agency in the country. It has prohibited troopers from using race as
a factor to gauge criminal behavior. It has installed video cameras in
patrol cars in the most troublesome barracks. And it has required troopers
to have an "articulable suspicion" of criminal activity before they ask a
driver to consent to a vehicle search.

In short, it has done everything the new law demands and more. The result?

"We have five or six years of data showing gross racial disparity in who's
stopped on the interstate," said Deborah Jeon, an attorney with the
Maryland ACLU. "Getting at the problem is just much more difficult than
keeping data and putting out a piece of paper that says, 'Don't do it.' "

Since 1999, 10 states including Maryland have enacted laws requiring data
collection; three more passed laws to eliminate racial profiling. In
addition, data collection bills are close to being passed in Colorado and
Texas. And the federal government and dozens of municipal and state
agencies have begun keeping statistics, many voluntarily.

Other agencies are under legal mandate to collect traffic data. Since last
fall, Montgomery County officers have been required to record the racial
characteristics of every motorist they stop. The rules are part of the
settlement of a four-year civil rights probe by the U.S. Justice Department.

The numbers are slowly rolling in. As they do, they are raising difficult
questions about exactly how to recognize racial profiling.

Should the percentage of minorities stopped by police be measured against
their presence in the local population? Or should there be some effort to
find out how many minorities are speeding along in the flow of traffic?
Should vehicle searches be tracked as an important measure of profiling?

Across the country, police and community representatives are just beginning
to grapple with those issues, as well as more fundamental concerns about
the accuracy and completeness of the data collected.

In Houston, for example, where Mayor Lee Brown initiated a voluntary data
collection program in 1999, a recent study by the Houston Chronicle found
that police failed to record the race of the driver in hundreds of
thousands of traffic stops, making a meaningful analysis virtually impossible.

"Unfortunately, in a lot of places where data collection has been mandated,
police are not going the extra step to develop benchmarks" to accurately
measure racial disparity, said Temple University professor John Lamberth,
one of the country's premier analysts of traffic-stop statistics. "A lot of
places are reporting the data, and then the question becomes, 'What does it
mean?' And no one seems to know."

That problem has become almost intractable in Maryland. Here, the state's
trove of data allows virtually any statistical question to be asked and
answered. Yet despite intense settlement negotiations between police and
the ACLU, the two sides still cannot agree on whether racial profiling
exists and, if so, what to do about it.

Police officials are just as frustrated by the stalemate as the ACLU and
its plaintiffs.

"We feel we're doing all we can do and the numbers are purely what the
numbers are," said Lt. Col. William Arrington, chief of the field
operations bureau, who is black.

Police point out that they stop far more white drivers than black ones and
that they search only a fraction of the thousands of vehicles they stop.
They do a search, they say, either because the trooper notices clear
evidence of wrongdoing (the smell of marijuana smoke through a lowered
window) or because they have a reasonable suspicion that criminal activity
is afoot (the driver's name is not listed on the car's rental agreement)
and the driver consents. For a consent search, police are not required by
law to have a reason for the search.

Why do minorities suffer the majority of police searches?

"I don't know," Arrington said. "But it does not suggest a problem to me."

Arrington noted that since 1999, video cameras have recorded every traffic
stop made by troopers from the JFK Memorial Highway barracks in Cecil
County, near the Delaware line. That barracks has been the focus of the
ACLU's most intense scrutiny. None of the videos, Arrington said, has shown
"a trooper acting inappropriately."

The legal battle began in May 1992, when a Harvard University-educated
public defender was stopped in Cumberland, Md., while driving from a
funeral in Chicago back home to the District. Robert L. Wilkins refused to
consent to a police search, and he and and three relatives were held for
almost an hour while a state trooper called a police dog to sniff the car
for drugs.

Wilkins was convinced that the trooper stopped the car because his family
is black. Later, he obtained a confidential state police report urging
troopers in Western Maryland to be on the lookout for black drug
traffickers in rental cars with Virginia tags, similar to the car Wilkins
and his family were traveling in.

He contacted the ACLU and filed suit in 1993. The state police quickly
offered to settle for $50,000, but Wilkins held out for a promise that
police would track traffic stops to determine whether troopers were
targeting people for "driving while black."

The settlement was signed in 1995. In 1996, the ACLU had Lamberth examine
the data. He drove along I-95 north of Baltimore and counted speeding cars
to establish the percentage of law-breaking drivers who were black.

Measured against that benchmark, the Maryland numbers were staggering. At
the JFK barracks, nearly 30 percent of drivers stopped were black, though
Lamberth estimated that blacks accounted for only 17 percent of the
law-breakers. And of the drivers searched, 73 percent were black.

In 1997, a federal judge found a "pattern and practice of discrimination."
In 1998, the ACLU filed a new suit backed by testimony from 14 additional
plaintiffs and more than 125 alleged victims of racial profiling.

No one wants the case to go to trial, and both sides are urgently looking
for common ground.

"We would like for there to be an agreed-upon resolution to this case that
everyone could be happy with, rather than a big court fight that places us
as antagonists," Wilkins said.

"But I'm not going to lie about the reality," he said. "Maryland has really
been the capital of racial profiling in the United States. The disparities
on I-95 in Maryland match or beat anything documented [elsewhere], and
they've been going on for years and years and years. And they continued
even after the settlement of a lawsuit and the involvement of a federal
judge. How much worse can you get than that?"