DRIVING WHILE STOPPED

Once upon a time in a decade far, far away, there were people in this
country who did not think the police were their friends. They called police
officers hurtful names and even made rude oinking noises behind their backs.

Times change. In recent years, the police have enjoyed enormous public
support. Many people believe the police can do wrong. Whenever Democratic
or Republican politicians from the president on down want to boost their
popularity, they simply announce they are going to put even more police on
the streets.

Unfortunately, there are still isolated pockets of individuals in our
society who raise questions about police practices. The police should track
those people down and arrest them for something.

Police don't need to be overly concerned, though. They can always be
confident the people who complain about their conduct are in a minority.

That's why the Black and Hispanic Caucus of the Legislature slipped a study
into the state budget to require law -nforcement agencies to compile data
for one year on the race, gender and age of every driver pulled over in
traffic stops.

There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that a disproportionate number of
drivers stopped by police in America are minorities. This evidence is in
the form of anecdotes told by every member of a minority who has ever been
in an automobile.

Politicians pass laws based on anecdotal evidence all the time. Frequently,
they pass sweeping laws based on a single anecdote that has appeared on the
front page of a newspaper under a really big headline. But when anecdotes
have to do with the treatment of minorities, even if there are mountains of
such anecdotes, majority politicians don't know whether to believe them or
not. They can't act on mere anecdotal evidence. They need hard data. That's
why there are so many government studies to find out things we already know.

OK. So minority politicians working within the system managed to include in
the state budget a requirement that every law enforcement agency collect
data for a year that might indicate "racial profiling" in traffic stops.
They even gave police a whole year to clean up their act. The study would
not begin until 2001.

You would not think compiling such data would be very difficult. After all,
the people stopped by police are color-coded. All of the information
departments are required to provide already is routinely included in police
reports.

But apparently, we have overestimated the ability of police to fill out the
simplest of forms. Law enforcement agencies have asked Gov. Tommy Thompson
to veto the study of racial profiling because of the crushing burden of
paperwork it would impose upon police and sheriffs' departments.

Checking off a box indicating the race of a driver may take only a fraction
of a second, but when all of those tiny fractions are put together for a
whole year, they could add up to as much as 20 or 30 minutes. All law
enforcement throughout the state could be brought to a stand-still.

That is not to even mention the physical danger to officers of having their
fingers absolutely shredded with paper cuts.

On the other hand, a strong case could be made that unfairly detaining
citizens on the basis of race is an extremely bad thing. There is something
terribly out of whack racially about our entire criminal justice system.
Blacks and Latinos who are, in fact, minorities make of the majority of
those incarcerated in our state prison system and our urban jails.

More whites than blacks or Latinos use drugs in our country, but those
incarcerated on drug charges are overwhelmingly minority. Could the root of
such inequities be something as simple as the extremely high number of
traffic stops of minorities that then lead to drug searches?

Traffic stops may seem like minor inconveniences to whites who don't get
stopped, but they have the potential to escalate. The most controversial
death-penalty case in the country today-that of Mumia Abu-Jamal-began when
Philadelphia police pulled over the black journalist's brother in a traffic
stop.

It is no mere inconvenience when black parents, fearing for the lives of
their children, have to instruct their teenagers not to aggressively assert
their rights as citizens, no matter how unfair or un-American a traffic
stop may seem to be. One theory used to be that minorities were more likely
be stopped by police because they were kept in such a permanent state of
economic subservience that they all drove old junkers with burned-out tail
lights.

Then people started noticing that the only drivers more likely to be pulled
over than minorities in old cars were minorities in brand-new cars.

The burden on police and sheriffs' departments of noting the race of every
driver they stop may be horrendous. But departments should welcome the
study as an opportunity to prove once and for all that laws are enforced
equally without one whit of racial bias.

As supporters of unlimited police searches like to say, innocent people
don't have anything to hide.