INCIDENT TYPIFIES RACIAL PROFILING

Star Of Broadway'S `Ragtime' Recalls Being Caught In Roundup

NEW YORK -- Alton White still remembers what apologetic New York police
officers said when they set him free: He was simply in the wrong place at
the wrong time.

On a hot July afternoon, the black star of Ragtime on Broadway was arrested
in the lobby of his Harlem apartment building, along with five other men.
Police were looking for two Latinos suspected of dealing drugs, but they
handcuffed everyone in the vestibule and took them to the local precinct for
questioning.

White was held for five hours, even though police quickly determined he had
no criminal record, no gun and no drugs on him. He was strip-searched, and
told to be quiet when he objected. By the time White was released, he had
missed that night's performance and was traumatized.

"This kind of stuff happens to black men in America all the time," said
White, who is readying a lawsuit against the New York Police Department,
alleging that his constitutional rights were violated. "Do you think this
would have happened if I was Caucasian? They saw that I was black, they were
looking for someone, and that's all these police officers had to know."

Although White, 35, and his attorneys from the New York Civil Liberties
Union are discussing a settlement with the city, he says his $750,000
lawsuit is not just about money. The soft-spoken actor wants police to
implement changes that would prevent such race-based detentions and make
individual officers more accountable.

White's detention may seem minor in a city that has been rocked by
allegations of police cruelty and violence. Three officers were convicted
earlier this year in the sodomizing of Abner Louima at a Brooklyn precinct,
and four others will go on trial next year for the shooting death of Amadou
Diallo -- an unarmed West African peddler who was mistaken for a rapist and
caught in a hail of 41 bullets as he stood in the vestibule of his Bronx
apartment building.

But the actor's experience is far more typical of the police treatment that
minorities say occurs daily across America. Such "racial profiling," which
is illegal, takes place when officers use race as the chief criterion to
stop or arrest minority suspects, instead of specific information about a
particular crime.

"Racial profiling poses a great ideological problem in police work -- the
old question of liberty vs. security," said Paul Chevigny, a New York
University law professor. "We all insist on our constitutional rights, and
racial profiling is wrong. But we also want the crime rate to keep going down."

Amid protests over the practice in New Jersey, Maryland, Illinois and other
states, President Clinton has directed federal law enforcement agencies to
collect data on the race, ethnicity and gender of people they stop and
search. New York Mayor Rudolf Giuliani has denied that police engage in
racial profiling.

White recalls that police told him they were looking for two Latino men,
ages 17 to 21. The actor is dark-skinned and clearly in his mid-30s. Even
after neighbors implored police to let White go, officers insisted on
arresting him.

Giuliani has heralded the city's 54 percent drop in crime, but White's story
rekindles an old debate: How much of the decrease comes at the expense of
civil liberties?

"They say we should be happy because crime is going down in New York, but I
don't feel safer in my home after what happened," said White.

"The cops told me I was in the wrong place, and I live here," White said.
"Something's got to change, because the minute you finish this interview
with me, I could walk out on the street -- and the whole thing could happen
again."