ON-TRAIN SEARCHES POINT TO PROFILING

Police, Lacking Race Data, Note Complaints Are Rare

They haven't attracted the attention of drug searches on the New Jersey
Turnpike and other highways. But charges of racial profiling are being
leveled on another busy battlefield in the drug war - the nation's trains
and train stations.

Larry Bland, a black Bethesda, Md., resident who is a former gospel choir
director, says he had just walked off a train in Richmond, Va., in July
when police told him they needed to search his bag because drugs were
coming through the station and he "fit the profile."

Carlos A. Hernandez, a former Newark policeman, believes he was singled out
for a tense drug search of his Amtrak sleeper cabin coming back from Miami
that same month simply because his name is Hispanic.

Police insist both stops were valid and that race was not a factor used to
profile the men as drug suspects. but civil libertarians and attorneys say
that, whatever the truth for Bland and Hernandez, such cases are widespread
and raise the same troubling questions about the role of race in drug
enforcement that have put state police in New Jersey and elsewhere in a
harsh spotlight.

"That is really just a silver of what's going on out there," said David
Harris, a University of Toledo law professor who prepared a national report
for the American Civil Liberties Union on racial profiling on the highways.
Georgetown law professor David Cole agreed.

Train searches "have been going on for a long time," said Cole, who
reviewed several years worth of court decisions involving such stops for a
text on race and the law.

Searches, said Cole, "are a practice the {U.S. Supreme} Court has created
that allow the police to approach people without any justification for
suspicion. The problem is when the police do that, they don't approach
everyone. They generally single out minorities."

Law enforcement officials disagreed. There is no way to tell, because
police don't record or report the race of people they target for drug
questioning or searches. And unlike Bland and Hernandez, most of those who
are searched and let go don't bother to complain, preferring to swallow
their anger and get on with their lives.

As his train stopped in Baltimore July 22, Hernandez said a police officer
went into his cabin while he was away from it. Two others stood outside and
two more plain clothes waited nearby.

"They say, ' We want to search your luggage,' " Hernandez recounted.

"I say, ' Why would you want to do that?'

"They say, ' We have information you are carrying a large amount of
narcotics.'

"I told them, ' You got the wrong guy.' Everyone was looking."

Amtrak police and the U.S. attorney's Office in Washington, D.C., said they
had specific information giving them grounds to question Hernandez. A man
who had been arrested on the train with about 21/2 pounds of cocaine said
he was working with a "Carlos." Racial profiling was not involved, Amtrak
said in a written statement.

"Isn't that a coincidence?" said Hernandez. "I'll bet my kids life they
looked at the train's manifest, saw an Hispanic riding first class, $694
round-trip ticket, and they just wanted to shake me down."

Hernandez said that, either way, officers were clearly in the wrong by
entering his cabin while he was out.

"I think: You went into my cabin, that's a burglary," he said.

A railroad spokesman declined to comment.

Members of the Richmond-area Metro Interdiction Unit had no tip to lead
them to Larry Bland, 46, when he got off his train in the Virginia capital
July 16. Two officers told Bland they stopped him because of the way he
separated himself from two other people leaving the train, as if he didn't
want to give the impression of them being together.

"It's ridiculous," said Bland, former director of a popular Richmond gospel
choir, who now lives and works in Bethesda. "I said, 'Profile? You're
stopping me because I'm black.' "

From Amtrak police to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which
runs Operation Jetway - a little-known program to train police searching
for drugs on trains, planes and buses - police say race is never used in
their profiles of suspected criminals.

"We look at behavior and circumstances," Huggins said. "It's not
necessarily any one thing. It's a pattern."

the head of the DEA's office in Newark, Anthony Seneca, said racial
profiling is too simplistic a way to identify criminals.

"To profile is stupid," Seneca said. "There is no percentage in it. Not
only is it illegal, it's a waste of energy."

Investigators, including Lt. Roger Jones, the head of the narcotics
interdiction unit of Washington's metropolitan police, said they don't want
to reveal too much about what draws their attention. But, they said,
suspicious signs include people who pay cash for expensive, one-way tickets
at the last minute, or whose phone number turns out to be bogus. Getting a
sleeper car but not checking any luggage is on the list. At the stations,
travelers who act unusually nervous, constantly glancing over their
shoulders, draw scrutiny.

Particular attention is paid to well-known drug corridor routes and the
stations along those routes, such as Miami to the north, or Los Angeles to
New York.

Typically, officers will approach a person, ask where he might be going,
and then ask for permission to search. Almost no one, police, attorneys and
other experts agreed, says no.

"Most people say go ahead and search. It's amazing," said Jones - even
those who turn out to be carrying drugs or guns.

The director of the ACLU in Virginia, Kent Willis, said: "There is a
general feeling that to say no to a search is somehow an admission of
guilt. It's a prevailing personality characteristic that trumps our own
sense of our constitutional rights."

Police also have another trump card: Saying no to a search can bring the
threat of hours of delay.

Veteran Washington defense attorney David Niblack cited an example from
when he served as a public defender in Wisconsin some years ago. One of his
agency's appellate attorneys, an Orthodox Jew, was flying back from Miami
when, during a stopover in Chicago, police said they suspected him of
carrying drugs. When he identified himself and refused to give consent, the
detectives laughed and said he could spend the night in the Cook County
jail while they sought a warrant.

"So he gave consent. He had to get back," Niblack said. "Most people let
them search them. And most people don't complain."

The lack of formal complaints is touted by law enforcement agencies as
proof that profiling is not a problem.The director of the NAACP's
Washington bureau said it proves something else entirely: a need for hard
statistics on the race of everyone stopped or questioned by the police.

Hilary Shelton said the organization has asked every branch of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People to report "enforcement
encounters," wherever they may occur.

Shelton and others said that without firm statistics showing exactly whom
the police stop, such as the data forced out of state police in New Jersey,
Maryland and elsewhere about highway stops, profiling will remain a daily
reality to people of color and an invisible issue to white America.

In the case of stops on the New Jersey Turnpike, the statistics were
damning. Almost 80 percent of those arrested were black or members of other
minorities. And almost eight out of 10 encounters where state troopers
asked permission to search a vehicle involved minorities.

But there are few or no statistics available for what is happening on the
trains and at the stations. Amtrak refused to release information on how
many drug interdiction actions its officers participate in, how often
searches on trains occur, the total amount of drugs seized on trains, or
even how many people its police arrest a year.

"Amtrak does not release publicly sensitive information, in order to
prevent compromising law enforcement activities that ensure customer
safety." the railroad's statement said.

Some of those who have complained of being targeted for searches, including
Hernandez, said train employees told them drug sweeps aboard a train can
occur several times a month. Defense attorney contend sweeps pop up as
often as once or twice a week. they also say train employees can be paid to
tip cops to suspicious travelers.

an Amtrak spokesman, john wolf, declined to comment except to note that the
railroad runs more than 200 trains a day and carries 21 million people a
year, so that searches affect a tiny percentage of the railroad's service.

Huggins, the Virginia State Police superintendent, said the harvest of
contraband from trains and stations is worth the effort. He also is
confident his interdiction team acts properly. But he doesn't expect
suspicions about racial profiling to go away.

"This whole issue is clearly one of the major issues, if not the major
issue, facing law enforcement nationwide," he said. Drug interdictions have
become so sensitive, he said, that Virginia is considering trying to apply
videotape procedures not just to stops in patrol cars, but to encounters at
train and bus stations.

"If there is a problem out there, law enforcement needs to know about it,
and law enforcement needs to correct it. Whether the problem is real or
perceived is irrelevant. Perception is reality. It's incumbent on me to do
what I can to enhance the perception you have of me and not get hunkered up
on hind legs and ignore it," Huggins said.

Hernandez has consulted attorney Steven J. Kossup and is considering legal
action against Amtrak. Kossup has filed paperwork with various government
agencies reserving his right to file a lawsuit. Bland said he simply hopes
debate over his case serves to help end profiling.

Both Bland and Hernandez said part of the reason they went public was
because their anger intensified after police, having found nothing, went
off without even an apology.

Hernandez said, "Their goodbye words were, ' Are you mad?' "