POLICE TO START TRACKING RACE IN TRAFFIC STOPS

Sometime after New Year's, Rhode Island's roughly 2,300 police officers
will start an unprecedented, enormous and, to some of them, distasteful
project: collecting statistics to see whether officers are stopping
motorists for racial, rather than legitimate law enforcement, reasons.

The subject is what people of color refer to, in a bitter joke, as "driving
while black." They mean there is an extra, unwritten traffic law that
causes police to pull them over for no reason other than the color of their
skin.

That racist practice, proven to exist elsewhere, might stem from federal
drug enforcement officials' past use of "profiles" of drug smugglers,
profiles that included race, as part of training for police to decide whom
to search for illegal drugs.

Rhode Island police officials say they reject the practice, but members of
minority groups say it happens regularly. Civil-rights groups demanded an
objective study, but law enforcement officials were unenthusiastic.

After two years of legislative struggles, endless bill drafts and numerous
compromises, the General Assembly last June passed legislation requiring a
study. Now both sides, and the public, are apparently about to start
finding out what's actually happening on the shoulder of the highway.

Despite the struggle over the legislation, East Providence Police Chief
Gary Dias, president of the Rhode Island Police Chiefs Association, said
the chiefs are committed to making the study work and to responding to its
findings.

"The better we get along with the community, the more we know about what
the problems are, the better off we are," Dias said. "We're looking to
determine if there's a problem, and if there's a problem, it's wrong and we
have do so something about it."

Anthony Maione, spokesman for the Rhode Island Civil Rights Roundtable and
a member of an advisory committee on the profiling study, said he's
optimistic that "We should have at least a reasonable picture of what's
going on out there" when the study is complete.

Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island affiliate of the
American Civil Liberties Union, said that "If the study's done properly, it
has a very good chance" of establishing whether racial profiling occurs in
Rhode Island.

The two-year study will involve keeping a record every time officers make
what they call a "traffic stop" -- pull someone over, for whatever reason.
Some stops lead to nothing, some to citations for violations such as
speeding, some to searches for drugs, some to arrests.

The police are supposed to record on a card the date, time and location of
the stop, the ethnicity, gender and age of the driver, the reason for the
stop, whether the vehicle was searched and any contraband seized, and
whether a citation or arrest resulted.

Nobody is really sure how often police stop vehicles in Rhode Island.
Officials say the best guess is about 300,000 per year. That's a bit less
than one stop for every other adult in the state.

The flood of cards will be gathered by the office of Atty. Gen. Sheldon
Whitehouse, who is conducting the study, the information read into a
computer by a card scanner, and the data analyzed by a team from
Northeastern University that will look for indications that minority group
members are stopped or searched disproportionately.

Each police department is to report its data to Whitehouse monthly, and
Whitehouse is to issue quarterly summaries of the departments' data. The
legislation says the study is to end with a report to the General Assembly
including analysis that will "determine the extent to which racial
profiling exists within the state."

Besides requiring the study, Governor Almond's signature on the Traffic
Stop Statistics Act last year made racial profiling illegal in Rhode
Island. But it probably didn't end the dispute. The study might just shift
the battle to different ground.

The legislation defines racial profiling as "the detention, interdiction or
other disparate treatment of an individual solely on the basis of the
racial or ethnic status of such individual."

But there is room for endless argument about just where legitimate police
work stops and profiling begins.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Gerald Coyne, Whitehouse's deputy handling the study,
said that getting all the data could turn out to be "the easy part."

"What do you use those numbers to compare to?" he asks, posing a key
question before the consultants.

If police stopped more non-whites than whites, it would raise questions,
because Rhode Island is only about 8 percent nonwhite. If they stop and
search disproportionate numbers of minority-driven cars and don't find
anything, or don't find anything any more often than they do in cars driven
by whites, that would raise questions, too.

But there are no official figures on the ethnic makeup of motorists on
Route 95 through Rhode Island, let alone all the other roads in the state.
So what's "disproportionate" -- 9 percent nonwhites, or some other number?
What if the figures came from an area heavily populated by minority group
members, where more minority group members would be expected to be on the road?

One of the consultants from Northeastern, Deborah A. Ramirez, a professor
at the university's School of Law, reassured Rhode Island officials at a
meeting earlier in the fall that similar studies have been done
successfully in hundreds of other jurisdictions.

"We're not reinventing the wheel here," she said at the time.

If the Northeastern experts' analysis finds that there is indeed profiling
going on, the next question will be what to do about it.

The study is deliberately set up to avoid antagonizing the police. For
example, the cards won't contain one obvious bit of information, -- the
identity of the officer making the traffic stop.

That would have enabled the study to determine exactly which officers were
disproportionately stopping nonwhites, and Whitehouse's consultants
recommended it, but the legislation didn't require it. That major
concession helped get the bill passed, and civil-rights advocates and
police commanders hope it will encourage rank-and-file officers to comply
with the law.

Instead of identifying officers, police departments are dividing their
towns up into sections, and the location, along with the date and time of
the stop, will be recorded.

"The objective is to determine if racial profiling exists within the state
of Rhode Island," said Chief Dias. "It's not to target any law enforcement
agencies, or individual officers."

"The result we're looking for is more important than identifying a small
proportion of officers who are doing that," Dias said.

Asking thousands of individual officers to help discover whether they are
doing something that is illegal and which a large part of society finds
outrageous seems, on its face, a dubious proposition. Couldn't officers
just cheat, and say they pulled over a white driver when it was really a
black driver?

Maione, the Civil Rights Roundtable spokesman, said he expects some
officers to be uncooperative.

Experience in other states, he said, indicates that "There will be officers
who are resistive." Officers could, for example, check "white" when they
have actually stopped a black person.

But Maione and others involved say they think that there are enough ways to
check the data to keep it valid.