CIVIL RIGHTS PANEL FINDS NEW YORK POLICE USE RACIAL PROFILING

WASHINGTON -- The New York Police Department improperly uses racial
profiling to stop and question people, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
concluded Friday.

This police tactic is a factor in the racial tensions that can lead to
"tragic and unnecessary" incidents like the shooting of Amadou Diallo,
according to a report approved 6-2 by the advisory panel.

The report also calls into question department training and recruitment of
black and Hispanic officers. It recommends creation of an independent
office to investigate accusations that police wrongly used deadly force.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's office did not immediately respond to a request
for comment Friday. In an earlier rebuttal to a draft report, city
officials contended the commission's work was "shoddy" and relied too
heavily on police critics such as the Rev. Al Sharpton.

Reviewing the department's "stop and frisk" tactics, the report found that
blacks and Hispanics were stopped far out of proportion to their
representation in a given community. For example, 51 percent of people
stopped and searched in the Staten Island in 1998 were black, while the
borough's population is only 9 percent black.

The commission chairwoman, Mary Frances Berry, said evidence indicated that
such rates of minority searches belied police contentions that blacks and
Hispanics were stopped more frequently because they matched the
descriptions of crime victims.

"They simply stop who they think they should stop," Berry said, reading
from the report. "The NYPD needs to be careful not to engage in racial
profiling of this sort. ... It not only violates the law but undermines
respect for the police and can cause deadly altercations, as in the tragic
and unnecessary police shooting of Amadou Diallo."

Diallo was shot and killed outside his Bronx home on Feb. 4, 1999, in a
hail of police gunfire that struck him 41 times. The four officers involved
in the shooting were acquitted earlier this year.

Commission members Carl Anderson and Russell Redenbaugh voted against the
report.

Like Giuliani and top city police officials, Redenbaugh said he did not
think the conclusions of racial profiling were supported by the facts. He
also gave officials credit for New York's sharp drop in murder and other
serious crimes.

"The notion that the racial mix of who you stop ought to resemble the
racial mix of the people in the neighborhood is a specious use of
statistics," Redenbaugh said. "I don't know if there is racial profiling or
not."

The commission's report also found that unlike other major cities, New
York's police department has not fully adopted community policing practices
that minimize racial tensions and that its training program "reinforces
stereotypes instead of undermining them."

The report also recommended police recruits earn at least a two-year
college degree. The commission found that officers without that minimum
education level are more likely to have misconduct complaints.