RACIAL PROFILING TIED TO WAR ON DRUGS

New Jersey Officials Say DEA Encouraged Tactic

Weaving its way through the 91,000 pages of documents on racial profiling
released by New Jersey officials this week is a largely overlooked thread
in the national debate on race and crime: Although states like New Jersey
have been the most egregious offenders, the textbook on singling out
minority drivers was written by the federal government.

New Jersey officials argue that the reason racial profiling is a national
problem is that it was initiated, and in many ways encouraged, by the
federal government's war on drugs. In 1986, the Drug Enforcement
Administration's "Operation Pipeline" enlisted police departments across
the country to search for narcotics traffickers on major highways and
instructed officers, to cite one example, that Latinos and West Indians
dominated the drug trade and therefore warranted extra scrutiny.

Since then, the DEA and the U.S. Department of Transportation have financed
and taught an array of drug interdiction programs that emphasize the ethnic
and racial characteristics of narcotics organizations and teach local
police how to single out cars and drivers who are likely to be smuggling.

Among the characteristics they have trained officers to look for: people
wearing dreadlocks and cars with two Latino males traveling together.

Federal officials contend they never taught racial profiling and that local
departments using discriminatory tactics misapplied the DEA's intelligence
reports. Federal officials have taken several steps in recent years
intended to measure the problem, most notably President Clinton's 1999
executive order that any police force receiving federal money for drug
interdiction must keep track of the race of anyone stopped, searched or
arrested by officers.

But even the American Civil Liberties Union, a persistent critic of state
policies on racial profiling, said much of the blame for the policy falls
on the DEA.

And in May 1998, as the U.S. Department of Justice was investigating
whether the New Jersey State Police needed a federal monitor to oversee the
department's efforts to deter profiling, Anthony Senneca, head of the DEA's
Newark office, wrote to state police officials to praise the troopers'
methods and effectiveness on the turnpike.

The letter singled out the exemplary work of five troopers, including John
Hogan, who, one month earlier, was involved in the April 1998 shooting of
three unarmed minority men on the New Jersey Turnpike, an incident that
propelled racial profiling onto the nation's political agenda.

David Harris, a University of Toledo law professor who has written
extensively about racial profiling, said the DEA had conveyed similar mixed
messages across the country.

In response to that criticism, the Justice Department's Civil Rights
Division reviewed DEA procedures, including the Operation Pipeline
training, in 1997, said Kara Peterman, a department spokeswoman. She
declined to characterize the findings, but two other federal officials said
the department concluded the program was sound and that the DEA did not
encourage or teach profiling.

New Jersey's attorney general, John Farmer Jr., offered an empathetic
interpretation of the department's findings.

"In a lot of ways, the Justice Department in Washington has been going
through what we in New Jersey went through," Farmer said yesterday. "The
troopers in the field were given a mixed message. On 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?"