ARE TRAFFIC STOPS RACIAL PROFILING?

Blacks Being Targeted, Defense Lawyer Claims

FLAGSTAFF - Attorney Lee Brooke Phillips found it strange, mighty
strange, the long list of African-American men who made their way to
his office after drug arrests in northern Arizona.

After all, Phillips said, it was rare to even see a Black person in
Coconino County.

Yet he represented dozens of them after Arizona Highway Patrol traffic
stops on Interstate 40, considered by law enforcement officials to be
the main drug-smuggling route between Los Angeles and the East Coast.

Now, after two years of extensive research, monitoring traffic
infractions and traffic stops on the highway, Phillips and the
Coconino County Public Defender's Office feel they are sitting on a
potential powder keg of information about racial profiling.

The Arizona Department of Public Safety, which runs the Highway
Patrol, says race plays no role traffic stops. But in January,
Coconino County Judge Robert Van Wyck ordered the DPS to turn over an
estimated 15,000 copies of tickets, warnings and other traffic stop
data. The order covers events on I-40 within the county from June 1,
1999, to June 1, 2000.

It's expected to be Arizona's first in-depth look at the racial mix of
traffic stops on one of its highways. Phillips said that once the DPS
documents are produced, the percentages of stops involving both
African-Americans and Hispanics can be more thoroughly analyzed.

On Thursday, the Coconino County Attorney's Office announced that all
traffic stop records from June 1-Dec. 31, 1999, had been destroyed.
Phillips said he was told that all identifying information about the
motorists on the remaining documents could be redacted, including race.

"This could get ugly," Phillips said.

County Attorney Terence Hance said destroying old tickets is routine
and his office filed a motion for clarification as to what DPS is
expected to produce in the traffic stop records.

"There's a problem here because the records of traffic stops aren't
computerized, and there were 49,000 total in this district during that
time period," Hance said. "There are also policies about redacting
certain personal information, but I don't think race will be one of
the problem areas."

DPS officers rely on "race-neutral indicators" when making traffic
stops, DPS Lt. Dan Wells said. "We look at probable cause and
reasonable suspicion factors only. We don't tolerate racial profiling
and investigate it thoroughly if it is reported."

Mario Diaz, a spokesman for state Attorney General Janet Napolitano,
said her office has conducted two conferences about preventing racial
profiling. New policies and procedures concerning police stops will be
sent to all state law-enforcement agencies in May, she said.

"We're doing everything possible on this front," Diaz said. "The
bottom line is that traffic stops have to be made for actual reasons
rather than a hunch."

Diaz said among the policies being adopted are ensuring proper conduct
by officers at traffic stops, educating field supervisors about the
warning signs of racial profiling, community outreach about who to
call if racial profiling occurs and systems within police departments
to evaluate, log and audit complaints.

Phillips, who said he was ignored by the Attorney General's Office
when he requested an investigation last summer, said the new policies
are long overdue.

"There's a lot of people being stopped because of the color of their
skin and detained because of the color of their skin," Phillips said.

To prove that, Phillips hired John Lamberth, a Temple University
professor who has designed surveys to gauge racial profiling on the
roads in high-profile cases won by plaintiffs against police in New
Jersey, Maryland and California.

At Lamberth's direction, two-person survey teams drove I-40 within
Coconino County on 15 four-hour shifts from June 4-7 last year. They
recorded what they determined to be traffic violations, determined the
race or ethnicity of drivers and counted the number of vehicles
stopped by police and the race or ethnicity of those stopped.

The survey teams documented 348 vehicles violating the law in which
the race or ethnicity could be determined. Of those, African-Americans
drivers made up less than 3 percent of offenders. Of all people
stopped by police, however, more than 43 percent were
African-Americans, the survey teams noted.

Lamberth said less than 20 percent of those stopped by DPS were
Hispanics, while Hispanics accounted for 13 percent of those observed
violating a law.

In a report filed with Judge Van Wyck, Lamberth wrote, "All of the
data available to me is consistent and strongly supports the
contention that the Arizona Department of Public Safety is targeting
African-American motorists on I-40 in Coconino County."

Reached at his office in Philadelphia, Lamberth said he "wasn't in a
position to say" conclusively that racial profiling was occurring
without analyzing the 15,000 traffic stop records.

"It appears to me there has been more resistance from DPS as far as
analyzing data than any other state I've been involved in and one
wonders what that is about," Lamberth said.

The state has argued that the traffic survey was deficient because it
had too small a sample size, no protocol and wasn't sufficiently random.

Phillips said the widespread racial profiling problems along I-40
began a decade ago in the aftermath of the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Agency's "Operation Pipeline." That operation trained police officers
to stop more vehicles and "profile" the driver and passengers while
attempting to get permission to search the vehicles for drugs, cash
and weapons - without a warrant.

"The most common method is for police to stop a vehicle for speeding
or following too closely behind another vehicle," Phillips said. "One
of my African-American clients driving a U-Haul was followed 20 miles
by a DPS officer before a stop was made."