RACIAL PROFILING ROUTINE, NEW JERSEY FINDS

TRENTON, Nov. 27  At least 8 of every 10 automobile searches carried out by
state troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike over most of the last decade were
conducted on vehicles driven by blacks and Hispanics, state documents have
revealed.

Those figures, contained in 91,000 pages of internal state records
distributed today by the state attorney general's office, showed that a
systematic process of racial profiling became a routine part of state police
operations, Attorney General John Farmer said.

The documents released by Mr. Farmer were among those being sought by
lawyers representing minority drivers who are suing the state, claiming
racial discrimination.

Mr. Farmer explained that the practice of singling out black and Hispanic
drivers evolved as part of the drug war of the mid-1980's, when the federal
Drug Enforcement Administration began asking local police forces to
intercept narcotics traffickers on major highways.

Mr. Farmer said the policy had some success as a crime-fighting tool. He
said 30 percent of the searches on the turnpike turned up some kind of
contraband, while 70 percent turned up nothing improper.

But even as such race-based tactics helped the New Jersey State Police
arrest thousands of drug smugglers, the agency's methods inflicted a
terrible price on the state's minority residents, Mr. Farmer said, as
troopers discriminated against thousands of black and Hispanic drivers who
were stopped and searched solely because of their skin color.

"The effect of that kind of ratio over 10 years is devastating," Mr. Farmer
said. "This may have been effective in law enforcement terms, but as social
policy it was a disaster."

Mr. Farmer, who became attorney general 17 months ago, said he was releasing
the documents as a way to "pay a debt to the past" and try to rebuild public
confidence in the force. But he also defended the actions of previous
attorneys general, saying that the law regarding profiling was muddled, and
that many of the drug interdiction policies that encouraged profiling were
taught by the Drug Enforcement Administration and the federal Department of
Transportation.

Even today, Mr. Farmer said, case law conflicts on when it is permissible
for an officer to consider race in deciding to stop a driver. He praised
Gov. Christie Whitman for making New Jersey the first state to take sweeping
measures to stop racial profiling.

Mr. Farmer's remarks and the release of the documents did little to quiet
many civil rights activists, however. The Rev. Reginald T. Jackson,
executive director of the New Jersey Black Ministers Council, said the
Whitman administration ignored complaints for years, and acted only after
three unarmed minority men were shot by two troopers on the turnpike in
April 1998. He called for a change in the State Constitution to make the
attorney general's office an elected one. Under the state's current
constitution, adopted in 1947, the attorney general is appointed by the
governor.

"Right now the attorney general is not going to do anything that the person
who appointed him is opposed to," Mr. Jackson said. "He is not the people's
lawyer; he is the governor's lawyer. Who do the people go to?"

And the documents are also likely to intensify the criticism of one of the
governor's longtime political allies, Justice Peter G. Verniero of the State
Supreme Court, who was attorney general from 1996 to 1998.

During public hearings before his confirmation to the state's high court in
1999, Mr. Verniero testified that he had no detailed knowledge of any
statistical evidence of profiling until the attorney general's office conduc
ted its own review of the State Police in 1999.

But one memo from an assistant attorney general to Mr. Verniero, dated July
29, 1997, included an audit of the Moorestown barracks, which had been the
subject of repeated complaints of racial profiling. The audit showed that
blacks and Hispanics, who make up 13.5 percent of the drivers on the
turnpike, accounted for more than 33 percent of the traffic stops.

During his sworn testimony before the State Senate, Mr. Verniero also
insisted that he had worked in cooperation with the United States Department
of Justice, which was conducting a civil rights investigation of the
profiling allegations. But a memo from a meeting on May 20, 1997, at which
Mr. Verniero and his assistants discussed their response to the federal
investigation, also contains handwritten notes that indicate that Mr.
Verniero was adamantly opposed to entering into a consent decree and
allowing a federal monitor to oversee the department. The notes, which are
believed to have been written by an assistant attorney general, say that Mr.
Verniero declared that before he'd sign a consent decree, "they'd tie me to
a train and drag me along the track."

Mr. Verniero has declined to discuss the matter.

The documents, which fill 185 three-ring binders and are available in 15
CD-ROM sets to anyone willing to pay $1,000, make up the most complete
record to date of a problem which has, fairly or not, come to dominate the
national reputation of the New Jersey State Police.

The records include a vast array of material spanning the administrations of
three different governors and seven attorneys general: from state police
training manuals, major policy initiatives and disciplinary records to
minutiae like radio logs and thousands of pages of individual traffic
tickets issued by troopers. Mr. Farmer noted that in 1990 and again in 1993,
the state responded to complaints of racially biased enforcement by
strengthening its training for troopers and restating its opposition to
racial profiling.

"The department acknowledged the abuse, tried to address it and believed
that they had," he said.

But when a Gloucester County judge ruled in 1996 that there was evidence of
profiling by troopers on the southern end of the turnpike, there was a
concerted effort to deny the problem, the documents show. A series of memos
from 1996 and 1997 show that state police commanders and some members of the
attorney general's office continued to deny the widespread practice of
racial profiling by troopers even though they had detailed statistical
evidence of the problem.

By 1997, for instance, the department's own internal audits found that in
some barracks, members of minority groups accounted for 80 percent or more
of all searches. The investigation by the attorney general's office and the
Justice Department found that such results were common throughout the state.

In one of the harshest assessments of the force, Deputy Director Debra L.
Stone of the Department of Law and Public Safety wrote in February 1999 that
discrimination was so deeply ingrained in state police culture that veteran
troopers acted as "coaches" and taught profiling tactics to rookies.

"Trooper after trooper has testified that coach taught them how to profile
minorities," Ms. Stone wrote. "The coaches also teach this to minority
troopers."

Ms. Stone's memo said that the troopers also went to great lengths to cover
each other's misdeeds, and that after the April 1998 turnpike shooting, the
troopers brought in a drug-sniffing dog in hopes that it might find evidence
to justify the stop and the gunfire. No contraband was found.

William Buckman, a lawyer who argued the Gloucester County case, said that
he was stunned that many of the documents released today were denied to
lawyers who requested them five years ago.

"There seems to be only one reason to withhold all of this: to conceal from
the public how high up in the attorney general's office people were aware of
the length and the breadth of the problem," Mr. Buckman said. "And the
striking thing, even today, is that when you read these documents, you get
no sense of urgency, no sense of outrage that people ware being harassed
because of their race, and it must be stopped no matter what."

Mrs. Whitman, who was attending a conference in California, issued a written
statement praising Mr. Farmer for releasing the documents.

"While racial profiling did not begin in this state or under this
administration, history will show that the end of racial profiling in
America did indeed begin in New Jersey and under this administration," she
said.

The political furor surrounding the issue is almost certain to continue. The
State Senate Judiciary Committee, which is investigating the issue, plans to
take sworn statements from a wide range of state officials and may hold
public hearings early next year.