PROFILING WAS USED IN WAR ON DRUGS

Attorney General John J. Farmer Jr. released more than 90,000 documents
Monday showing that high-ranking state officials embraced a "war on drugs"
at the cost of violating the civil rights of black and Hispanic motorists.

Farmer said the state's anti-drug policy encouraging New Jersey troopers to
consider race as a factor when determining whom to stop on the roadway
yielded "pretty good" drug catches, but resulted in a disastrous erosion of
trust between minorities and troopers.

Troopers began using race as a factor in the late 1980s at the height of a
federal drug interdiction program, known as Operation Pipeline. But last
year, the Attorney General's Office ended the practice, prohibiting
troopers from considering race at all, even though federal courts have
ruled that it was legal for law enforcement officers to consider race as
one of several factors when stopping and searching motorists.

Statistics previously released by the state showed seven out of 10 minority
motorists searched for drugs by troopers were found not guilty.

"It's my hope in releasing these documents that we can sort of pay our debt
to the past," Farmer said. "It's become clear to me over the year and a
half that I've been here that that hasn't been fully accounted for."

The documents, which were made available in a public reading room in the
Hughes Justice Complex in Trenton and on 15 CD-ROMs, range from mundane
traffic tickets to training materials used at the state police academy and
to confidential memos between state police and the Attorney General's Office.

Governor Whitman commended Farmer's release of the documents, which total
91,000 pages and date as far back as 1985.

"The release of documents covering three gubernatorial terms and the tenure
of seven different attorneys general is one more step in ensuring that
there is never again confusion between aggressive police work and the
rights of law-abiding motorists," Whitman wrote in a statement.

The Black Ministers Council of New Jersey decried efforts by the attorney
general to "spin" the documents to make the state look less culpable. They
said the documents will show a long-standing effort by the state to cover
up evidence of racial profiling.

"When these documents are reviewed it will show that the practice of racial
profiling has been going on knowingly for two decades," the Rev. Reginald
Jackson, executive director of the Black Ministers Council of New Jersey,
said at a news conference at St. Matthew's AME Church in Orange on Monday.

"These documents will show that this administration denied racial profiling
even when it knew it [existed]," Jackson said.

Assemblyman LeRoy J. Jones Jr., D-Essex, said the state has failed to take
action on allegations of racial profiling.

"Leadership has been absent," Jones said. "Leadership is about recognizing
the need for reform. We're not going to let Mr. Farmer spin this."

The documents seem to bolster a pile of lawsuits filed by minority troopers
and minority motorists who claim they were victims of racial discrimination
by troopers and assert that state officials knew their complaints were
legitimate but ignored or sought to discredit them.

Lawyers representing minority motorists spent much of the day combing
through the long-secret documents, many of which are stamped
"confidential," in search of memos to back up their lawsuits. The documents
didn't disappoint.

After leafing through some of the papers, William Buckman, a
Moorestown-based lawyer representing several minority motorists, began to
talk settlement.

"Certainly, the extent of attorney general awareness that racial profiling
was deep-seated and widespread is undeniable," Buckman said. "From my
standpoint, it would be prudent for state officials to talk about resolving
these things, because that's in the best interest of the taxpayers."

Some of the documents released Monday had been obtained by The Record last
month. Those documents showed that Farmer's predecessor, Peter Verniero,
sought to limit the amount of information to be turned over to U.S. Justice
Department investigators looking into allegations of racial profiling on
the New Jersey Turnpike.

Farmer said Monday that the documents do not show Verniero, now a state
Supreme Court justice, and his staff tried to hinder the federal
investigation or limit its scope.

The full breadth of the documents, however, conflicts with Farmer's
characterization.

In an Oct. 31, 1997, memo, Alexander Waugh Jr., who then was executive
assistant attorney general, told Verniero that the Justice Department
wanted copies of forms signed by minorities who agreed to allow troopers
patrolling the southern end of the New Jersey Turnpike to search their cars.

Waugh said he didn't think the "consent to search forms" were relevant to
the federal probe, although they reveal the trooper's initial reason for
stopping the motorist, providing information that investigators are seeking.

"For this reason, I do not believe we could resist their production," Waugh
wrote. "However, Deputy Attorney General [George] Rover and I want to go on
record that we are not consenting to any broadening of the scope of the
inquiry."

With Verniero's approval, Rover sent a letter to the Justice Department
objecting to handing over the forms but agreeing to do so.

An April 22, 1997, memo forwarded to Verniero expresses concern with the
Justice Department's expanding laundry list of information it's seeking.

"While we will continue to address documents and information requests on a
case-by-case basis, I suggest that we pursue a parallel course of action
with USDOJ [the U.S. Department of Justice]," wrote Rover, the deputy
attorney general responsible for providing federal investigators with state
police data.

Rover then suggested that if troopers were engaging in racial profiling,
the fault lay with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which
provided troopers with intelligence and training documents "replete with
references to so-called 'indicators' of drug trafficking, including those
indicators that focus on the race or ethnic origin of the suspect."

"As a parallel course of action, I believe the attorney general should
consider reaching out to several other [attorneys general] and write a
letter or meet with high level DEA and/or justice department officials to
review the scope and objectives of the present inquiry," Rover wrote.

"Simply put, USDOJ cannot have it both ways; DEA cannot continue to
encourage the NJSP to aggressively interdict narcotic shipments while at
the same time subject the NJSP, who are using the DEA's interdiction
techniques, strategies, and intelligence operations, to a critical inquiry
based upon nonconclusive statistical data."

Farmer said troopers were to use race as one indicator of who was likely to
have drugs in their car because federal enforcement agencies were providing
"intelligence that certain ethnic groups were using the New Jersey Turnpike
as a pipeline" for "the distribution of these drugs." Farmer said he's
realized that the description of possible drug couriers was too broad.

The DEA told troopers that ethnic Chinese, West African/Nigerian,
Pakistani, Indian, and Colombian groups are the largest "visible heroin
trafficking groups and a major threat in New Jersey at the wholesale drug
level."

Troopers were given training materials stating that because "blacks value
material goods, blacks who are not able to purchase their own home put
money into cars."

"Whether or not there is any reliable sociological research to support this
assertion, I strongly question its value in the context in which it is
used," Waugh wrote in a Nov. 21, 1994, memo to the attorney general's
public relations office.

Waugh sent the memo and attached the training material to alert Becky
Taylor, then the attorney general's director of communication, of its
release to lawyers making claims of racial profiling and preparing the
attorney general for "adverse publicity."

Trenton Correspondents Jeff Pillets, Randy Diamond, and Herb Jackson and
Staff Writer Paul Johnson contributed to this article.