MISSING THE EARLY SIGNALS OF RACIAL PROFILING

When Peter Verniero became state attorney general in July 1996 he inherited
a problem. Four months earlier a Superior Court judge had concluded that
state troopers patrolling the New Jersey Turnpike had singled out black and
Hispanic drivers for traffic stops.

Some of those stops resulted in car searches and the arrest of 17 minority
drivers on narcotics charges. The 17 were convicted but appealed,
contending they were the victims of discriminatory treatment. Their lawyer
presented evidence that 36 percent of drivers pulled over on the southern
two-thirds of the turnpike were black.

The judge, Robert E. Francis, a former prosecutor, accepted this contention
and went further. He declared, "The state police hierarchy allowed,
condoned, cultivated, and tolerated discrimination between 1988 and 1991."

This was pretty sensational stuff but it didn't get as much attention in
North Jersey as it deserved. Responding, the state police said that the
judge was mistaken, that he had been misled by bad statistics. The state
Department of Law and Public Safety prepared an appeal.

At that time the head of the department, the attorney general, was Deborah
Poritz, now the chief justice of the state Supreme Court. She signed off on
the appeal. We can infer that she treated this case like many others
claiming that some part of the state government had done something wrong.

Here the accused agency was an elite police force, part of her own
department, and the force was denying it had done anything wrong. Better to
let the appeal go forward, she may have reasoned, so that a three-judge
Appellate Division panel could review the evidence and the trial judge's
conclusions.

In this case stronger action was warranted. A judge had found credible
evidence that state troopers had horribly misused their authority. This was
a time for top officials to take a step back and say, "Wait a minute. What
are these guys supposed to have done? Is it possible that they really did
it? If so, did their superiors know about it? If so, shouldn't we be
talking about abandoning the appeal? Shouldn't we be talking instead about
disciplinary action for those involved?"

This did not happen. What did happen was that Governor Whitman appointed
Poritz to the Supreme Court and made her chief justice, the first woman to
hold the job. This was widely noticed. Not so the governor's appointment of
Peter Verniero to succeed Poritz.

Verniero had served the governor as chief counsel and chief of staff. He
had never worked in the Department of Law and Public Safety until he became
its chief. He inherited a raft of pending business from Poritz, including
the state police appeal, and saw no reason to second-guess his now very
distinguished predecessor on this item. So another opportunity was lost to
head off a political and legal disaster.

Although the state government's table of organization located the state
police force in the Law and Public Safety Department, the force was
semi-autonomous. It had grown from a constabulary of 81 men in 1921 to more
than 2,500 troopers and senior officers, backed by 1,000 civilians, with a
budget this year of $180 million. Its leadership was ingrown,
up-from-the-ranks guys.

The public image of a trooper is a speed-limit cop, but the department had
shifted focus to drug-traffic interdiction. Turnpike troopers were earning
plaudits by turning traffic stops into narcotics busts. The state police
superintendent received regular bulletins from federal drug enforcement
experts advising that minorities were more likely to be drug couriers than
whites. What, in retrospect, was surprising was how zealously and
improperly some troopers were following up on that information.

The U.S. Department of Justice got wind of problems with the New Jersey
State Police and asked for racial data on traffic stops and arrests.
Articles published last week by The Record and The New York Times show that
state police commanders reacted to this request as a public relations
problem, one that could sully the force's image. They saw their task as
damage control.

Verniero ordered collection of fresh data. In response, a state police
sergeant found that of 38 searches conducted on the central and southern
portions of the turnpike on 30 randomly selected days in 1995 and 1996, no
fewer than 31 involved minorities. The sergeant reported this to the
superintendent.

Nor was the disparity confined to the turnpike. For example, troopers
assigned to the Perryville station in rural Hunterdon County arrested 171
drivers in the course of a year. Of those, 91 were minorities. State police
commanders decided to submit to the feds only data confirming what was
already suspected, that turnpike troopers were targeting blacks and Hispanics.

Exactly what Verniero knew and when he knew it are disputed. In 1999 he
told senators considering his Supreme Court nomination that it was not
until April 1998, when two turnpike troopers fired on a van carrying young
minority men, that the reality of racial profiling crystallized in his
mind. The governor, defending him, said his report last year acknowledging
the problem was the first in the nation. Far from deserving censure for a
cover-up, he should be praised, she said.

We are going to hear more about this, a great deal more. The Senate
Judiciary Committee is gearing up for hearings. The key fact is that had
Verniero, Poritz, or, for that matter, the governor herself stopped to
think, stopped long enough to ask whether troopers sworn to uphold the law
were actually subverting the rights of minority citizens, all of this
trauma could have been avoided.