THE COLOR OF SUSPICION

Sgt. Mike Lewis of the Maryland State Police is a bullnecked,
megaphone-voiced, highly caffeinated drug warrior who, on this shiny
May morning outside of Annapolis, is conceding defeat. The drug war is
over, the good guys have lost and he has been cast as a racist.

"This is the end, buddy," he says. "I can read the writing on the
wall." .

Lewis is driving his unmarked Crown Victoria down the fast lane of
Route 50, looking for bad guys. The back of his neck is burnt by the
sun, and he wears his hair flat and short under his regulation Stetson.

"They're going to let the NAACP tell us how to do traffic stops," he
says. "That's what's happening. There may be a few troopers who make
stops solely based on race, but now they're going to let these people
tell us how to run our department. I say to hell with it all. I don't
care if the drugs go through. I don't."

He does, of course. Lewis was born to seize crack. He grew up in
Salisbury, on the Eastern Shore - Jimmy Buffett country - and he
watched his friends become stoners and acid freaks. Not his scene. He
buzz-cut his hair away and joined the state troopers when he was 19.

He's a star, the hard-charger who made one of the nation's largest
seizures of crack cocaine out on Route 13. He's a national expert on
hidden compartments. He can tell if a man's lying, he says, by
watching the pulsing of the carotid artery in his neck. He can smell
crack cocaine inside a closed automobile. He's a human drug dog, a
walking polygraph machine.

"I have the unique ability to distinguish between a law- abiding
person and an up-to-no-good person," he says. "Black or white."

All these skills, though, he's ready to chuck. The lawsuits accusing
the Maryland State Police of harassing black drivers, the public
excoriation - and most of all, the governor of New Jersey saying that
her state police profiled drivers based on race and were wrong to do
so - have twisted him up inside.

"Three of my men have put in for transfers," he says. "My wife wants
me to get out. I'm depressed."

What depresses Lewis is that he believes he is in possession of a
truth polite society is too cowardly to accept. He says that when
someone tells this particular truth, his head is handed to him. "The
superintendent of the New Jersey State Police told the truth, and he
got fired for it" Lewis says.

This is what Carl Williams said, fueling a national debate about
racial profiling in law enforcement: "Today, with this drug problem,
the drug problem is cocaine or marijuana. It is most likely a minority
group that's involved with that"

Gov. Christine Todd Whitman fired Williams, and the news ricocheted
through police departments everywhere, especially those, like the
Maryland State Police, already accused of racial profiling - the
stopping and searching of blacks because they are black.

The way cops perceive blacks - and how those perceptions shape and
miss-shape crime fighting - is now the most charged racial issue in
America. The systematic harassment of black drivers in New Jersey; the
shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant, by New York
City police officers earlier this year; and other incidents in other
states have brought the relationship between blacks and cops to a
level of seemingly irreversible toxicity.

Neither side understands the other. The innocent black man, jacked up
and humiliated during a stop-and-frisk or a pretext car stop, asks:
Whatever happened to the Fourth Amendment? It is no wonder, blacks
say, that the police are so wildly mistrusted.

And then there's the cop who says: Why shouldn't I look at race when
I'm looking for crime? It is no state secret that blacks commit a
disproportionate amount of crime, so "racial Profiling" simply good
police work.

In the old days, when Lewis was patrolling the Eastern Shore, it was
white people he arrested.

"Ninety-five percent of my drug arrests were dirtball-type whites -
marijuana, heroin, possession-weight. Then I moved to the highway, I
start taking Off two, three kilograms of coke instead of two or three
grams. Black guys. Suddenly I'm not the greatest trooper in the world.
I'm a racist. I'm locking up blacks, but I can't help it."

His eyes gleam: "Ask me how many white people I've ever arrested for
cocaine smuggling - ask me!"

I ask.

"None! Zero! I debrief hundreds of black smugglers, and I ask them,
'Why don't you hire white guys to deliver your drugs?' They just laugh
at me. 'We ain't gonna trust our drugs with white boys.' That's what
they say."

Lewis' dream: "I dream at night about arresting white people for
cocaine. I do. I try to think of innovative ways to arrest white
males. But the reality is different."

A big part of Lewis' reality is a black man named Keith Hill. Lewis
killed Hill three years ago. Hill was speeding down

Route 13 when Lewis pulled him over. He approached the car, Hill
rolled down the window and Lewis smelled burning marijuana. He ordered
Hill out of the car, began to search him and came up with thousands of
dollars of cash and packets of marijuana.

Hill suddenly resisted. What flashed through Lewis' mind was his
friend Edward Plank, a trooper killed by a coke runner on this same
highway a few months before. They fought, Hill knocking Lewis into a
ravine. They wrestled, and Hill went for Lewis' gun.

"We were in a clinch, just breathing heavy," Lewis recalls, "and I
said, 'Man, it's just pot. It's not worth it.' "

But Hill kept going for the gun, Lewis tells me. He couldn't get it
and ran. He looped through a housing development and back to his car.
Hill gunned the engine just as Lewis got himself in front of the car.
Lewis drew his weapon and fired, striking Hill twice in the chest.

Lewis speaks often of the shooting and of Plank's death. One day, he
collects for me old newspaper stories of trooper shoot-outs. I'm
reading them when we pass two members of his interdiction squad parked
on the median of Route 13. They've stopped two cars with New York
license plates filled with young black men.

"What's up?" Lewis asks Gary Bromwell, a bulky, sullen
trooper.

The two cars were pulled over for speeding and weaving, but that was a
pretext. The goal of Lewis' unit, the criminal-interdiction unit is
to find drugs, guns and untaxed cigarettes in the cars of smugglers.
However, in order to stop a suspected gun runner or drug mule,
troopers first have to find a reason in the state's traffic laws.
Bromwell issues written warnings and sends them on their way. I ask
Bromwell, who is white, why he didn't ask the young men their consent
to search the cars. Reasonable suspicion - anything the trooper can
articulate before a judge - is enough to justify a consent search.

"They're decent people," Bromwell says.

How can you tell?

"They looked me in the eye, and the driver's hand didn't shake when he
handed me his license"

Lewis interrupts: "No visible sign of contraband, no overwhelming odor
of air fresheners emanating from the vehicle, no signs of hard
driving" - that is, driving long hours without making stops.

He is listing Drug Enforcement Administration-endorsed indicators of
drug smuggling. Smugglers use air fresheners to fool drug-sniffing
dogs. Signs of hard driving - "these guys drive straight through
because they don't want to leave their drugs alone," Lewis says -
include loose-fitting clothing, day-old beards and food wrappers on
the floor. These signs, though, can also indicate the presence of
college students - which is, in fact, the case here.

Did you stop them because they were black men from New York? I
ask.

"Tell you the truth," Bromwell says, "we couldn't see who was driving
these cars. They were speeding."

After the New York cars pull into traffic, Lewis shows Bromwell and
his partner, Rob Penny, the newspaper clippings, hoping they will back
him up. "Eddie Plank," he says. "Killed by a black male. My shooting -
a black. Robbie Bishop, down in Georgia, killed by a black. North
Carolina trooper, killed by a black."

Bromwell looks uneasy. I ask him if he believes in a connection
between the race of the shooters and the crimes they commit.

"People might think it" Bromwell says, walking away, "but they don't
say it." He flashes Lewis a look that says shut up, and quick.

This is what a cop might tell you in a moment of reckless candor: In
crime fighting, race matters. When asked, most cops will declare
themselves colorblind. But watch them on the job for several months
and get them talking about the way policing is really done, and the
truth will emerge - the truth being that cops, white and black,
profile. Here's why, they say.

African-Americans commit a disproportionate percentage of the types of
crimes that draw the attention of the police. Blacks make up 12
percent of the population but accounted for 58 percent of all
carjackers between 1992 and 1996. (Whites accounted for 19 percent.)
Victim surveys - and most victims of black criminals are black -
indicate that blacks commit robberies.

Blacks and hispanics are widely believed to be the bluecollar backbone
of the country's heroin and cocaine distribution networks. Black males
between the ages of 14 and 24 make up 1.1 percent of the country's
population yet commit more than 28 percent of its homicides. Reason,
not racism, cops say, directs their attention.

Cops, white and black, know one other thing: They're not the only ones
who profile. Civilians profile all the time - when they buy a house or
pick a school district or walk down the street Even civil rights
leaders profile.

"There is nothing more painful for me at this stage in my life," Jesse
Jackson said several years ago, "than to walk down the street and hear
footsteps and start thinking about robbery - and then look around and
see somebody white and I feel relieved."

Jackson now says his quotation was "taken out of context." The context
he said, is that violence is the inevitable byproduct of poor
education and health care. But no amount of "context" matters when you
fear that you are about to be mugged.

At a closed-door summit in Washington between police chiefs and black
community leaders recently, the black chief of police of Charleston,
S.C., Reuben Greenberg, argued that the problem facing black America
is not racial profiling, but precisely the sort of black-on-black
crime Jackson was talking about.

"I told them that the greatest problem in the black community is the
tolerance for high levels of criminality," he recalled. "Fifty percent
of homicide victims are African- Americans. I asked what this meant
about the value of life in this community."

The police chief in Los Angeles, Bernard Parks, who is black, argues
that racial profiling is rooted in statistical reality, not racism.
"It's not the fault of the police when they stop minority males or put
them in jail," Parks told me. "It's the fault of the minority males
for committing the crime. In my mind it is not a great revelation that
if officers are looking for criminal activity, they're going to look
at the kind of people who are listed on crime reports."

I asked Parks to comment on the three-out-of-10 hypothetical. In
Maryland, the state police, as part of a settlement of an American
Civil liberties Union lawsuit reported that on a particular stretch of
highway, the police came up with drugs in three out of every 10
consent searches. This was deemed unacceptable by the ACLU.

"Three out of 10?" Parks said. "That would get you into the Hall of
Fame. That's a success story." He continued: "At some point, someone
figured out that the drugs are being delivered by males of this color
driving these kinds of vehicles at this time of night. This isn't
brain surgery. The profile didn't get invented for nothing."

To justify aggressive policing in black neighborhoods and on the
highways, cops cite numbers - but those numbers tell only part of the
story, albeit an important part. For one thing, blacks make up only 13
percent of the country's illicit drug users but 74 percent of people
who are sentenced to prison for drug possession, according to David
Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University and the author of "No
Equal Justice." Common sense, then, dictates that if the police
conducted pretext stops on the campus of UCLA with the same frequency
as they do in South Central, a lot of whites would be arrested for
drug possession too.

Of course, this doesn't happen, because no white community is going to
let the police throw a net over its children.

The real question about racial profiting is this: Is it ever
permissible for a law enforcement officer to use race as one of even
five or 10 or 20 indicators of possible criminality? In other words,
can the color of a man's skin help make him a criminal suspect?

Yes, says Whitman, the New Jersey governor. She suggests she doesn't
have a problem with the use of race as one of several profiles for
potential criminality. "I look at Barry McCaffrey's Web site," she
says, referring to the Clinton administration's drug czar, "and it
says certain ethnic groups are more likely to engage in drug smuggling."

It is true. Despite President Clinton's recent declaration that racial
profiling is "morally indefensible," the Office of National Drug
Control Policy's Web site helpfully lists which racial groups sell
which drugs in different cities.

In Denver, McCaffrey's Web site says, it is "minorities, Mexican
nationals" who sell heroin. In Trenton, "crack dealers are
predominantly African-American males, powdered cocaine dealers are
predominately Latino."

The link between racial minorities and drug selling is exactly what
Whitman's former police superintendent Carl Williams, was talking
about. So was Williams wrong? "His comments indicated a lack of
sensitivity to the seriousness of the problem."

But was he wrong on the merits?

"If he said, 'You should never use this solely; race could be a
partial indicator, taken in concert with other factors' " - she pauses
- - "but you can't be that broad-brushed."