FEDERAL INQUIRY FINDS RACIAL PROFILING IN STREET SEARCHES

A federal investigation of the New York Police Department's Street Crime
Unit has determined that its officers engaged in racial profiling in recent
years as they conducted their aggressive campaign of street searches across
the city, officials said.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan, who began their investigation in the
weeks after the 1999 shooting death of Amadou Diallo, are now in talks with
the Giuliani administration to discuss their findings and perhaps to
negotiate a set of changes that would avert a lawsuit, the officials said.

If the talks fail, prosecutors could seek authorization from the Justice
Department to go to court under civil rights law and ask a judge to order
broad changes in the operations of the Street Crime Unit and possible
oversight by a federal monitor.

Prosecutors have based their findings on a statistical analysis of the
Street Crime Unit's searches of people its officers had stopped because
they were suspected of committing crimes or carrying guns, one official
said. Prosecutors told the city that their analysis concluded that blacks
and Hispanics in the city were disproportionately singled out in the
searches, and that the imbalance could not be explained by the fact that
the city's minority neighborhoods typically had higher crime rates, the
official said.

Mary Jo White, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New
York, whose office has conducted the inquiry, would not comment other than
to say that her office's investigation was continuing. Officials with the
city corporation counsel's office also would not comment.

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and police and city officials have in the past
adamantly rejected allegations that any officers engaged in racial
profiling. They did so, for example, when the New York State attorney
general, Eliot L. Spitzer, issued a report late last year saying that the
department's street search tactics unfairly singled out the city's black
and Hispanic residents.

The Street Crime Unit - squads of elite undercover officers that were sent
into high-crime sections of the city - was seen by the department as one of
its great successes, the unit's ability to get guns off the street having
played a large role in the broader reductions in violent crime.

But the performance and conduct of the unit came under intense scrutiny
after Mr. Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant, was shot to death on a
Bronx street by four members of the unit. Although the four officers were
ultimately acquitted of any crime, the Police Department did significantly
reorganize the Street Crime Unit, and ordered many of its officers into
uniform.

Justice Department officials in Washington have yet to announce whether
they will seek criminal civil rights charges against the four officers who
shot Mr. Diallo.

The federal investigation into the Street Crime Unit is not the only
inquiry into problems within the department. Since 1997, after Abner Louima
was tortured in a Brooklyn station house, federal prosecutors for the
Eastern District of New York have been investigating patterns of brutality
within the department and deficiencies in disciplining problem officers.
Negotiations between the prosecutors and the city aimed at avoiding a
formal lawsuit have dragged on for months.

The full scope of Ms. White's investigation and its findings could not be
learned. When prosecutors first announced the inquiry, in March 1999, they
said the investigation would focus on whether officers with the Street
Crime Unit systematically deprived people of their rights through their
"stop and frisk" tactics and other practices.

But it is for the moment unclear what reforms Ms. White is seeking and
whether they would address only the Street Crime Unit or more generally
deal with the training and policies of officers throughout the department
who conduct stop-and-frisk operations.

The Justice Department has addressed concerns of racial profiling in other
cities. In one recent example, Los Angeles city officials negotiated a
series of reforms with the Justice Department to address allegations of
systemic abuse by the police. That tentative settlement includes a
requirement that the Los Angeles Police Department, in an effort to assess
the extent of racial profiling, collect data on the race of people who are
stopped by officers.

In another case, the New Jersey State Police entered into a consent decree
with the Justice Department barring police officers from using race as a
basis for making traffic stops. That settlement also requires troopers to
document the race, sex and ethnicity of all drivers who are stopped, and
provides oversight with a computer tracking system and a federal monitor.

Ms. White's findings came after her office obtained thousands of forms
documenting stop-and-frisk searches conducted by New York City police
officers over the last several years. The forms, known as UF- 250's, are
supposed to be filled out by officers when they stop and frisk someone on
the street, and are often used as an investigative tool.

The city spent about $1.5 million over many months to enter about 320,000
UF-250 reports into a computerized database, and then turned over the
database to prosecutors for analysis. Searches conducted by the Street
Crime Unit accounted for roughly 10 percent of the total reports.

Although it is not known what the city's response has been to the findings
of prosecutors, Mayor Giuliani and other city officials have repeatedly
dismissed previous allegations of racial profiling against the department.

When Mr. Spitzer, the state attorney general, asserted last year that his
study of stop-and-frisk incidents had indicated a bias against the city's
minority citizens, the mayor and police officials attacked the findings and
the methodology behind them as flawed. They said Mr. Spitzer's report
failed to adequately take into account the fact that a disproportionate
number of the city's violent crimes took place in minority neighborhoods.

And when a group of blacks and Hispanics filed a class-action lawsuit last
year, asking a federal judge in Manhattan to halt the operations of the
Street Crime Unit because, the suit said, the unit was illegally stopping
and frisking people because of their race, the city's corporation counsel,
Michael D. Hess, said: "The plaintiffs are asking the court to stop a
practice that does not exist. Therefore, there is nothing to stop."

Mayor Giuliani has also asserted that the Clinton Justice Department has
been responding to political pressure in its investigations, most recently
after the Rev. Al Sharpton met with Attorney General Janet Reno in August,
urging her to to seek federal oversight of the Police Department.

It is possible, too, that city officials could argue that steps have
already been taken to improve the fairness of street searches. The Police
Department last summer began a pilot program in different commands across
the city that required officers to fill out much more detailed reports on
their searches, a step that department officials said would make it easier
for officers to explain and justify their actions.

Moreover, the Street Crime Unit today is structured very differently from
the way it was when Mr. Diallo was killed. Instead of an autonomous unit
that operated across the city under its own chain of command, the Street
Crime Unit has been divided into eight separate teams that report to the
police chiefs responsible for the eight patrol sectors in which the city is
divided.

Police officials who announced the change last year described it as a
redeployment. Officers, however, flew a white flag of surrender that day
outside their headquarters in the Bronx.

Officers still stop and frisk people they suspect of carrying guns, and
focus much of their attention on violent criminals, but the mission has
broadened.

Many of the officers are assigned to prevent crimes against livery-cab
drivers by patrolling in unmarked cars and stopping cabs when they suspect
a driver might be in trouble. Others are put in a variety of settings in
which the police need to expand their plainclothes presence, like in the
stands at Shea Stadium when John Rocker of the Atlanta Braves takes the mound.