NEW JERSEY TURNPIKE DATA SHOW DECLINE IN SEARCHES

By IVER PETERSON

TRENTON, April 23 -- State troopers along the southern segment of the New
Jersey Turnpike have nearly stopped making the kind of highway vehicle
searches that are the focus of charges of racial profiling, according to
figures compiled by the state police.

Statistics for the turnpike as a whole show a sharp drop in searches, to
281 in 2000 from 440 in 1999. The falloff seems to be accelerating this year.

Officials with the state police and the state troopers' union differ over
whether the drop indicates better police procedures or a force that has
been intimidated by the furor over racial profiling. But the figures are
the first indication that the continuing debate over racial profiling and
police conduct could be having a serious impact on police procedures.

According to figures released by Col. Carson J. Dunbar Jr., the state
police superintendent, state troopers at the Moorestown station made 163
consent searches in 1999 and 150 last year, but only 8 in the first three
months of this year. Colonel Dunbar attributed the drop to both the uproar
over racial profiling and to changes in the training and supervision at the
station.

Consent searches are those in which officers, acting on hunches rather than
concrete evidence, are able to get the driver's consent.

Members of minorities remain far more likely to be the subject of a consent
search, however, despite the decline in numbers. Of the 440 vehicles
searched along the turnpike in 1999, 211 were driven by blacks, 119 by
whites, 109 by Hispanics and 1 by an Asian. Last year, the breakdown of
consent searches for the whole turnpike was 123 black, 83 white, 70
Hispanic, 3 East Indian and 2 Asian.

The Moorestown station, covering the turnpike south of Exit 7, has long had
a swashbuckling reputation for its aggressive efforts to interdict drug
trafficking. Its troopers' actions led to the first lawsuit against the
state charging racial profiling, and were the focus of the federal civil
rights investigation into the state police. That investigation resulted in
an agreement by the state to crack down on the singling out of minority
motorists for stops and searches.

"Quite frankly, I think some of this is a result of the attention, the
scrutiny," Colonel Dunbar said. "But what I feel is important is that
whatever we do involving searches, we do them appropriately. The key is
squeezing out anything that is not appropriate."

But Ed Lennon, president of the State Troopers Fraternal Association,
attributed the drop in searches to plain fear.

"What I am hearing is that the troopers don't want to put their necks on
the line right now," Mr. Lennon said.

In a groundbreaking police-profiling lawsuit in 1996 and hearings by the
State Senate Judiciary Committee over two months this year, vehicle
searches involving the motorists' consent emerged as a key indicator of
racial profiling, because such searches stem only from a trooper's hunch
about something as subjective as a driver's nervousness. They are therefore
different from probable-cause searches under United States Supreme Court
guidelines.

Probable-cause searches must be based on actual evidence -- the smell of
drugs, the butt of a gun sticking out from under a seat -- and therefore
require no consent.

"Consent searches tell you what the officer is doing with his purely
discretionary powers at the side of the road," said William Buckman, a
Moorestown defense lawyer who successfully used a charge of profiling to
quash evidence seized by troopers in the 1996 case. "They tell you that he
is elongating the stop for some reason, they tell you that he has not
developed probable cause but is nevertheless intent on searching the vehicle."

Consent search data for troopers covering the rest of the turnpike was
available only for January and February of this year. Troopers at the
turnpike's two other barracks, at Cranbury and Newark, were never as
aggressive as those at Moorestown, but their numbers also show a steady
decline.

Troopers from the Cranbury barracks, who cover the turnpike from Exit 8 to
Exit 13, made 96 such searches last year compared with 144 consent searches
in 1999. Those at the Newark barracks, covering the turnpike north of Exit
13, reported that the number of searches dropped to 36 last year, from 133
in 1999.

Police analysts do not consider two months long enough to draw conclusions
about trends. But the figures show that Cranbury reported 13 consent
searches for January and February, involving six Hispanics, four whites and
three blacks. The Newark barracks reported just four, involving three white
motorists and one black motorist.

Mr. Buckman said the steep drop in searches at Moorestown for the first
quarter of the year seemed to be good news.

"If you are representing to me that consent searches in Moorestown have
dropped to close to nothing, then that would certainly be a significant
indicator that one measure of racial profiling is down," he said. He added,
however, that the drop in consent searches may not tell the whole story. "I
would have to be convinced that officers haven't changed what used to be a
consent search into probable-cause searches."

Indeed, consent search statistics are only one out of several kinds of data
from police interaction with motorists, including total number of stops,
summonses issued, probable-cause searches and warnings.

The State Department of Law and Public Safety is in the final stages of
creating a reporting system to collect the details of all traffic stops by
the state police. Figures on total traffic stops, the broadest measure of
police activity, will not be made available until June.