RACIAL PROFILING OUTLAWED IN CALIFORNIA

THE most egregious example of one of the most egregious of public policies
- -- racial profiling -- was the adopted policy of the state of New Jersey
Highway Patrol. Racial profiling is, of course, absolutely unacceptable and
as a matter of public policy is now outlawed in California.

New Jersey released nearly 100,000 pages of documents concerning racial
profiling in that state. They reveal an almost unknown fact in answer to
the question, "Who wrote the book on picking out minority drivers which has
been elevated to a national problem?"

It turns out that the textbook was written by the federal government. New
Jersey revealed that racial profiling as a matter of policy was both
initiated and encouraged for adoption by law enforcement agencies as part
of the so-called war on drugs.

The Drug Enforcement Administration in its Operation Pipeline enlisted
state highway patrols, city police departments and county sheriff's
departments in the war. They were encouraged to search for narcotics
traffickers on highways and major streets. The DEA suggested that Latinos
and West Indians dominated the drug trade on the east coast and should
receive the majority of attention from state and local law enforcement
personnel.

Both the DEA and the U.S. Department of Transportation provided training
materials covering a variety of drug interdiction programs that focus on
social and ethnic characteristics of narcotics organizations. State and
local law enforcement agencies were taught by the feds various ways to
single out cars and drivers who may be part of smuggling organizations.

Two examples both disgust you but illustrate the point. Among the
characteristics the two federal Cabinet agencies (Department of the
Treasury and Department of Transportation) taught local cops to look for
were "people wearing dreadlocks" and "cars with two Latinos traveling
together."

The American Civil Liberties Union in its report Driving While Black,
written by David Harris, a law professor at the University of Toledo, said:
"The DEA has been the great evangelizer for racial profiling on the
highways. They had used the technique in airports to nab drug couriers and
thought this had great promise on the highways. So they taught it to local
departments and because the DEA agents weren't the ones actually pulling
over cars, they've never been really accountable for it."

It was not until 1995 that the DEA stopped distributing training videos in
which all the drug suspects had Spanish surnames. But not all the DEA
troops got the message. Just last year, the DEA's Newark, NJ, office
released its Heroin Trends report which said: "Predominant wholesale
traffickers are Colombians, followed by Dominicans, Chinese, West
African/Nigerian, Pakistani, Hispanic and Indians. Mid levels are dominated
by Dominicans, Colombians, Puerto Ricans, African-Americans and Nigerians."

In explanation of, if not in defense of its practices, New Jersey's
attorney general explained: "In a lot of ways the Justice Department in
Washington has been going through what we in New Jersey went through. The
troopers in the field were getting mixed messages. On the one hand we were
training them not to take race into account. On the other hand all the
intelligence featured race and ethnicity prominently. So, what is your
average road trooper to make of all this?"

Sadly, the DEA's program has been used to train more than 25,000 officers
in 48 states. It offered local police access to DEA's intelligence reports
which included descriptions of ethnic drug gangs and cartels.

Score one for Bill Clinton. Last year he issued an executive order saying
that any police force that receives federal money for drug interdiction
must keep track of the race of anyone stopped, searched or arrested by
officers.

States and localities, including California and Oakland, are scrambling to
undo what the national government taught, encouraged and trained them to
do.'Tis a sad commentary indeed. As the Gilbert and Sullivan song says, "A
policeman's lot is not a happy one."

Randy H. Hamilton is a visiting scholar at the Institute of Governmental
Studies, University of California, Berkeley.