THE COLOR OF SUSPICION (continued)

No one teaches racial profiling. "Profiling," of course, is taught.

It first came to the public's notice by way of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation's behavioral-science unit, which developed the most famous
criminal profile of all, one that did, in fact, have a racial component --
the profile of serial killers as predominantly white, male loners. It is
the Drug Enforcement Administration, however, that is at the center of the
racial-profiling controversy, accused of encouraging state law-enforcement
officials to build profiles of drug couriers.

The D.E.A., through its 15-year-old "Operation Pipeline," finances state
training programs to interdict drugs on the highway.

Civil rights leaders blame the department for the burst of race-based
stops, but the D.E.A. says it discourages use of race as an indicator.
"It's a fear of ours, that people will use race," says Greg Williams, the
D.E.A.'s operations chief. Cops use race because it's easy, says John Crew,
the A.C.L.U.'s point man on racial profiling. "The D.E.A. says the best
profile for drug interdiction is no profile," he says. "They say it's a
mistake to look for a certain race of drivers.

That's their public line. But privately, they say, 'God knows what these
people from these state and local agencies do in the field."' The A.C.L.U.
sees an epidemic of race-based profiling.

Anecdotes are plentiful, but hard numbers are scarce.

Many police officials see the "racial profiling" crisis as hype. "Not to
say that it doesn't happen, but it's clearly not as serious or widespread
as the publicity suggests," says Chief Charles Ramsey of Washington. "I get
so tired of hearing that 'Driving While Black' stuff.

It's just used to the point where it has no meaning. I drive while black --
I'm black.

I sleep while black too. It's victimology. Black people commit traffic
violations. What are we supposed to say? People get a free pass because
they're black?" How to Jack Up a Black Man: A Primer "You know, the black
people out here are different," Girolamo Renzulli says. He is formerly of
New York, now serving as a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff.

We are standing in the parking lot of the Lennox sheriff's station on the
edge of South Central Los Angeles. Renzulli speaks in low tones. "How so?"
"They're just, I don't know, different." Like how? "Wild," he says. "You'll
see." The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department does not look at black men
differently than it looks at white men: it is heinous to even suggest it,
the Sheriff himself, Leroy Baca, says. He has 8,000 sworn officers under
his command; the Sheriff's Department polices unincorporated areas of Los
Angeles County and 40 different towns. "It's happened before," Baca will
acknowledge. "When I was a lieutenant, I knew a deputy who stopped
nterracial couples.

We removed him from the field, disciplined him and transferred him out."
Today, though, it just doesn't happen.

Baca reads to me from his "Core Values" statement, which, among other
items, promises that sheriff's deputies will have the "courage" to stand up
to "racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and homophobia." "Even criminals have
dignity as human beings that must be honored," Baca says. This is not
necessarily an opinion shared by his men. Bobby Harris is a senior deputy
at the Lennox station, who, with four other deputies, shot and killed one
man this year, and, Harris says, "the year ain't over yet." Deputy Harris
is not shy about sharing his position on profiling, which does not dovetail
with Sheriff Baca's -- at least as Baca described his position to me.
"Racial profiling is a tool we use, and don't let anyone say otherwise,"
Harris says. "Like up in the valley," he continues, referring to the San
Fernando Valley, "I knew who all the crack sellers were -- they look like
Hispanics who should be cutting your lawn. They were driving cars like this
one" -- he points to an aging Chevy parked in the station's lot -- and all
the cars had DARE stickers on them. That's just the way it is." If it is
unclear whether Sheriff Baca is sincerely oblivious to the goings-on at the
Lennox station, many chiefs, I've found, are not terribly interested in
knowing too much about the tactics their subordinates use to bring down the
crime numbers -- crime reductions that, in this performance-driven era of
policing, are key to job preservation. In Baltimore, for instance,
rank-and-file officers know full well who a multi-agency drug interdiction
team that operates at the city's train station is looking for. "Everyone
knows they're looking for 'Yo girls,"' says Craig Singleterry, a black
Baltimore police officer. "Yo girls," Singleterry explains, are young black
women with long nails and hair weaves who carry such accouterments as Fendi
bags and who deliver drugs and money for dealers in New York. "Of course we
do racial profiling at the train station," says Gary McLhinney, the
president of the Baltimore Fraternal Order of Police. "If 20 people get off
the train and 19 are white guys in suits and one is a black female, guess
who gets followed?

If racial profiling is intuition and experience, I guess we all
racial-profile." Here is Baltimore's Police Commissioner, Thomas Frazier,
on racial profiling: "To say that being of any particular race makes you a
suspect in a particular type of crime is just wrong, and it's not done in
Baltimore." Roll call in Los Angeles, and the subject is an upcoming
demonstration protesting the police killing last December of a 19-year-old
woman in neighboring Riverside County. Tyisha Miller is the West Coast's
Amadou Diallo. She was shot to death while slumped in her car with a gun on
her lap. The police officers say they opened fire when she reached for the
gun.

"I hear Al Sharpton is coming out for this," one deputy says. "Can you
believe it? They're going to turn this thing into another goddamn O.J.,"
another responds. "And Jesse Jackson is coming." "Oh, for Chrissakes." All
but two of the deputies are white.

One is Hispanic, and he hangs with the whites.

The other deputy is black, and he does not participate in the conversation.
He instead stares at a fixed point on the wall in front of him. All of the
white men in the room wear their hair in crew cuts. Many of them are
ex-marines. Many also wear a tattoo of the Grim Reaper on their ankles.
Deputies assigned to hard-core gang areas often tattoo themselves
identically, very much like the gangs they fight.

It is the white deputies who do this, in the main, and civil rights
activists have loudly accused the Sheriff's Department of harboring racist
gangs, identifiable by the tattoos they wear. Because of the criticism,
deputies keep their tattoos a secret, even though they see nothing wrong
with them. "If it was a picture of a black man hanging from a tree, I could
see people getting upset," one deputy, Jeffrey Coates, told me. Coates is
perhaps the hardest-charging deputy at Lennox. He is a heavily muscled
white man, a power lifter who usually wears a mustache but shaved it off
for SWAT tryouts.

SWAT culture frowns on facial hair. The first time I met Coates, he was
training a new deputy, a black woman named Angela Walton. Walton and Coates
seemed to work well together.

It can be unpleasant to be a black female deputy in Los Angeles, and Coates
would rise to her defense.

Once, he recalled, a suspect taunted Walton, saying, "I bet yo' training
officer treats you real good."' "I wanted to beat his [expletive] face in,"
Coates remembered. "I told him to shut up, just shut up. Then he called me
a nigger.

I mean, what's that about? How am I a nigger?" Coates was reared in Iowa,
but he has an expert feel for the streets of South Central. He also seems
to attract gunfire.

Not long after I rode with him, he and his partner were shot at by a man
with a revolver, who missed. Last year, Coates and a partner killed a man
who opened fire on them from seven feet away. After the shooting, Coates
paid a mandatory visit to the department psychiatrist. "He asked me how I
felt. I said, 'I feel, [expletive] him. "Afterward, the black newspaper
wrote, 'Deputies kill another black man,"' Coates said. "But if this guy
dumped me, they wouldn't have said anything." Coates doesn't have much
patience for those who protest the killing of Tyisha Miller, or those who
complain about racial profiling: "I say, get your own house in order.

Stop the black-on-black homicide." On one of the days we rode together,
Coates and his partner for the day, Andy Ruiz, responded to a domestic call
that involved an angry young black man with a tire iron. They pulled up
just as the young man walked into the street. Coates grabbed the tire iron.
Ruiz pulled out his 9-millimeter pistol. He later said, "I was ready to
shoot him, really." Inside the apartment the young man with the tire iron
was trying to destroy, there were empty bottles of malt liquor on the
television console. Coates: "You ever hear Chris Rock? He does this thing:
'Guy says, I got a job, man! Like he's proud.

Well, [expletive], you supposed to have a job."' This is an inexact
recollection of a Chris Rock routine in which he delineates the differences
between "blacks" and "niggers." Rock is very popular with white cops.
Coates spent one day giving me what might be called a master class in the
art of the pretext stop -- pulling over blacks and Hispanics, hoping to
come up with dope, or guns, or information. "There's a law against almost
everything as it relates to a vehicle," Coates said. Coates knows the law,
and uses it. For example, Coates spotted a type of car, a Monte Carlo,
which is known to be favored by gangsters, moving along in traffic.

He pulled in behind the car and studied it for a moment. "No mud flaps,"
Coates said, turning on his lights. They pulled the car over, and asked the
three teen-agers, shaven-headed Hispanics, to step outside.

They patted them down and looked through the vehicle. The teen-agers freely
admitted to being members of the South Los gang. "Now the reason we stopped
you was that you have no mud flaps on your rear tires," Coates said. "But
the real reason we stopped you is because we saw that you're rolling out of
your area. Why don't you turn it around and go home." The men argued:
"We're just going to Costco." For what? "Pet food." "Pit bull?" Coates
asked. "Two," one of the men answered. Coates, same day, different vehicle,
a purple Buick Regal with a bumper sticker that reads, "Don't you wish you
were a pimp." Coates knows the owner of the car -- he put him in jail.
Behind the wheel is his wife. "There's got to be some violations on that
car," Coates said. There were two women in the car, smoking, and three very
small children. Not one was in a car seat. "There's something hanging from
your mirror, ma'am," Coates said, covering his bases. "Now, you've got to
have the baby in a car seat, O.K.?" The Regal pulled off, and Coates shook
his head. "I should take her to jail just for the secondhand smoke," he
said. "Smoking inside a car with little babies? Can you believe that? This
place is crazy." Coates doesn't believe that everyone in his patrol sector
is guilty of something. He told me he believes that slightly less than half
are guilty of something.

He has a good hit rate -- most of the drivers he stops are driving without
licenses or registration. But sometimes, in his sweep of the neighborhood,
he makes a wrong call. One day, while patrolling with Walton on a bleak
street of boarded-up bungalows and dead-eyed black men, he stopped a car
without license plates. An obvious stop, but it's what happened after the
car was stopped that warrants notice.

Every male Coates stops he asks to step to the police cruiser and place his
hands on the hood. Coates will then pat him down for a weapon. The man
driving this particular car acceded readily to this, but he was agitated.
"This is my neighborhood," he said. He was a black man in his 30's. He
seemed terribly embarrassed. Coates knew something was off when the man
produced his license, registration and insurance card, the trifecta of
responsibility. "I'm sorry.

I was just taking the car from the garage back home," the man said. "I
should have plates, you're right." He explained why he was nervous: "I work
at Northrop. I don't want anybody to see me like this." He had his palms
flat on the hood of Coates's cruiser as he was talking.

Walton was standing nearby, her hand near her weapon. Coates dismissed him
without writing a citation.

The man thanked the deputy profusely, and took off. It was a troubling
moment, and I asked Coates if it's his policy to remove every male from any
car he stops, no matter what the cause for the stop. "Yes. Officer safety."
"Would you do that in a different part of the county?" "I wouldn't do it in
Santa Clarita," he said, pausing -- realizing, perhaps, what that sounded
like. "I mean, it all depends." Do you recognize that you might have just
created an enemy on this traffic stop? "I was polite," he responded. "I
always treat people with respect." This is true -- he is generally
respectful, even affable.

But good manners do not necessarily neutralize humiliation. As I was
leaving, I asked Coates if he wore the Grim Reaper tattoo on his ankle. "I
haven't lied to you yet," he said. "So I'm going to have to take the Fifth
on that one." Playing the Percentages The sheriff's station in Santa
Clarita is located on a street named after a nearby amusement park, Magic
Mountain. Santa Clarita is part of Los Angeles County, but it is
geographically and culturally close to Simi Valley -- and a world away from
the ghettoes of South Central. Not a lot happens out in Santa Clarita,
which is why sheriff's deputies patrol in single-officer cars. Deputy Sam
Soehnel is assigned to patrol the middle-class and white Valencia area, as
well as the small, rundown Mexican section known as Old Newhall. Most of
his problems are in Old Newhall. "A lot of Hispanics are heavy drinkers,"
he says. "It's cultural." If pretext stops happen at all, they happen in
Old Newhall. A typical Saturday, a typical call. Someone has found a bank
door ajar. Soehnel comes to talk to the semi-hysterical woman who
discovered the open door. "Do you think someone is locked in the vault?"
she asks. the manager comes, and closes up. "People have very active
imaginations here," Deputy Soehnel says. Imaginations run wild, for
instance, when residents see a black man or a Hispanic man someplace he
"shouldn't be." "If you're in a nice area," Soehnel explains, "and you see
a Hispanic guy, he just sticks out, if he's just walking around, hanging
out. People will call 911. If it's off a citizen's call, I can make contact
with the individual. Ascertain what they're doing in the area." I ask if
it's his policy to pull people out of their cars during traffic stops. "It
depends.

A nice area, a guy in Valencia, no. But if it's somebody you're not used to
seeing, unfamiliar, yes. On this job, you learn that it's the nice guys
that get killed. " Recently, there was a home-invasion robbery on his beat.
A black suspect. "We get a lot of 911 calls," Soehnel says. " I got a call,
'There's a black guy walking around on people's lawns.' I get there, he's
wearing an electric-company uniform.

This woman sees a black guy walking on her lawn and goes ballistic."
Soehnel is sympathetic. To the woman. "You play the percentages," he says.
"That's the way it works.

People see a black guy, they think: 'carjacker."' Or rapist. Getting
Profiled to Death "Amadou Diallo was profiled to death," says Ben Ward, New
York City's first black police commissioner. The night Diallo was killed --
the night Rudolph Giuliani's experiment in "zero tolerance" came to an end
- -- the Street Crime Unit that fired the famous 41 shots was on the hunt for
a black rapist. Ward is no Sharptonite; he was one of the first black
police officials to talk openly about what he called the "the dirty little
secret" of black-on-black crime.

Yet he believes, he says, that most police officers are spectacularly
unqualified to discern the difference between lawbreakers and honest
citizens. "The demonstrable evidence shows that they stink at identifying
criminals," he says, noting that the Street Crime Unit of the N.Y.P.D.
reported that its officers stopped 45,000 people in 1997 and 1998, and
arrested only 9,500. The sociologist Jerome Skolnick once wrote that police
officers keep in their minds a picture of the "symbolic assailant." In his
work, Skolnick identified that "symbolic assailant" as a young black man.
It's not only white cops who keep that symbolic assailant in mind when
they're out on patrol. "Sometimes, I hate the young black males because of
what they do to their community," Mark Buchanan, a black antigang officer
in Boston, told me. "But then I think to myself, 'If this is the way I
feel, and I'm black, what must white officers think about blacks?"' I took
this question to Mike Lewis, the Maryland state trooper who thinks often --
very often -- about race. We were driving through a black ghetto on the
backside of Salisbury. It is, he says, a pit stop on the crack highway. Has
this job made you prejudiced? I ask. He turned his head in surprise.

It looked as if he wanted to say something, but nothing came out. Finally,
he says: "Let me tell you something.

We respond to calls here, and let's say it's a domestic.

We get there, 3, 4 in the morning, and the parents are cracked out, and the
kids are up watching TV and eating popcorn, and the place is crawling with
roaches.

When I go home, the first thing I do is take a shower." So are you
prejudiced? This is how he answers: "We arrested a Salisbury police
sergeant a few months ago, for drugs.

We knew he was involved with drugs.

For years.

He was black." Black, black, black, black.

It is what Mike Lewis sees. It is what Jeffrey Coates sees. It is tunnel
vision.

They understand half the equation -- blacks commit more of certain types of
crimes than whites.

But what they don't understand is, just because blacks commit more crimes
than whites doesn't mean that most blacks commit crimes. "I see a
16-year-old white boy in a Benz, I think, 'Damn, that boy's daddy is rich.'
I see a 16-year-old black, I think, 'That boy's slinging drugs,"' says
Robert Richards, a black police sergeant in Baltimore who admits that
tunnel vision is a hazard of the job. But like many black cops, he sees
nuance where white cops see, well, black and white. "When I start thinking
that way, I try to catch myself.

If I'm walking down the street and I pass a black male, I realize that,
chances are, he's not a criminal." It is, in some respects, nearly
impossible to sit in judgment of a Mike Lewis or a Jeffrey Coates. If
Coates says he must pull black men out of their cars and search them on
traffic stops, well, Coates has been shot at before, and most critics of
the Sheriff's Department have not. But if Coates -- and his department, by
extension -- believe that it is permissible to conduct pretext stops in
South Central but impermissible to do so in Santa Clarita, then there's a
problem. The numbers cops cite to justify aggressive policing in black
neighborhoods and on the highways tell only part of the story -- an
important part, but only part. For one thing, blacks make up only 13
percent of the country's illicit drug users, but 74 percent of people who
are sentenced to prison for drug possession, according to David Cole, a law
professor at Georgetown University and the author of "No Equal Justice."
Common sense, then, dictates that if the police conducted pretext stops on
the campus of U.C.L.A. with the same frequency as they do in South Central,
a lot of whites would be arrested for drug possession, too. Of course, this
doesn't happen, because no white community is going to let the police throw
a net over its children. What Gets Talked About, and What Doesn't Bob
Mulholland is the sort of white cop who scares even white people.

He is tall and thick and his eyes are hard. He works Philadelphia's 35th
Police District with Gene Jones and Mark Robinson. The three men meet up
one afternoon on a drug corner. Jones had been talking about the unequal
application of the law. He is a mash of contradictions. One moment, he will
speak of the need to "fry" black drug dealers.

The next, he will talk about the absurd double standard in law enforcement
- -- the way in which white drug users know with near 100-percent certainty
that they will never go to jail for marijuana possession. How they know
that they will never be jacked up during a pretext stop. How white cops cut
white kids a break. "We were doing a drunk-driving checkpoint one night,"
he said. "And I began to notice that when the cops caught a white kid
drunk, they would say things like: 'I'm going to call your father.

You're in big trouble.' With black guys, they'd just arrest them. Well, I
mean, black kids got fathers, too." Jones and Robinson like Mulholland.
They told me he was fair. So I asked him if he ever sees a double standard
in law enforcement, if the ghetto is policed one way and a white
neighborhood another. "My job is to clear this corner of [expletives]," he
says. "That's what I do." Do you ever cut anyone slack?

Maybe a student who's waiting for a bus? "My job is to clear this corner of
[expletives]," he says, again. But would you do that equally?

If this wasn't the ghetto, but a university campus, would you clear the
corner of white kids drinking beer? "I don't give a [expletive] who's on
the corner.

My job is to clear the corner of [expletives]." Jones and Robinson return
to their car and sit in silence. "Well," Jones says. "That's what you call
a back-in-the-day kind of attitude," Robinson says. The "day" being the
time when white cops didn't have to worry about repercussions. I ask them
if they believe Mulholland would in fact apply his corner-clearing skills
with equal vigor in a white neighborhood. "No," Jones says. "No," Robinson
says. "Sometimes, white guys come from white neighborhoods to this job,"
Jones says. "They don't know a lot of black people, except what they see on
TV. So they think they've got to act all hard. They get scared easy. "Bob's
a good guy, though," he continues. "He's a good cop. He's not a racist."
Jones and Robinson are truly perplexed.

White cops are impossible to understand sometimes.

Sometimes they're you're friends.

And sometimes. ... "You won't believe this," Robinson tells me one day. "I
got stopped." Really? "Yeah, in Abington." Abington is a white suburb over
the Philadelphia city line. "It was weird.

I was stopped at a light, and this police officer behind me puts his lights
on, so I pull it to the side, thinking he's going to pass me. I was
thinking like a cop. And then another car comes.

The first cop comes over to my window and says he stopped me because my
inspection sticker was placed abnormally high on the windshield." Gene
Jones begins to laugh. "I thought they were going to pull out rulers,"
Robinson continues. "I mean, inspection sticker too high on the
windshield?" I ask Robinson what he was wearing. "What I've got on now," a
denim shirt and a baseball cap. "Then he sees the police emblem on my car,
and he says, 'Oh, you're a cop?' I said, Yeah." Why do you think he pulled
you over in Abington? I ask. "I don't know. Maybe because my car is kind of
old." He doesn't believe this even as he says it. "Maybe it was that other
thing," he continues. "The thing we were talking about." Mark Robinson, the
cop who profiles, was just profiled, and he can't even call it by name.