POLICE `RACIAL PROFILING' TARGETED

Minority officers urged to `step up to the plate' to fight abuses

Acting assistant U.S. Attorney General Billy Lann Lee on Wednesday urged
minority law-enforcement officers "to step up to the plate" and fight racial
profiling and other abuses.

Speaking to a largely Hispanic audience attending the National Council of La
Raza, Lee said racial profiling, the practice of putting people under
criminal suspicion based on their race, "is the lazy way of doing law
enforcement."

"In my home county of Los Angeles, we had black officers step forward and
talk about how they were subject to racial profiling, even when in uniform,"
Lee said of the Justice Department's Civil Rights division.

"Local law enforcement has to step up to the plate, and minority police
officers have to be the leaders," Lee said in a panel discussion at the
George R. Brown Convention Center.

But Roberto Rodriguez, the panel's moderator and a syndicated columnist,
added that minority officers are also known to stereotype.

"It doesn't matter what color the officer is, it's the police mindset of
dehumanizing whoever is black or brown or of color," Rodriguez said.

Another panelist, Carmen Joge, co-author of NCLR's "The Mainstreaming of
Hate," a report on violence and law-enforcement abuse in the '90s, agreed.

"Hiring more minority officers helps, but we have to stop kidding ourselves
that minority officers do not engage in abusive behavior," Joge said.

More than 600 anti-Hispanic hate crimes were documented across the country
in 1997 and at least 24 Hispanic churches were on the national list of
suspected arson sites, the report stated.

Lee lauded the report that detailed cases, including the Houston
investigation of Pedro Oregon Navarro, an unarmed, 22-year-old Hispanic who
was shot nine times in the back by police.

"You have hate crimes and police misconduct affecting this community," Lee
told the audience.

One solution is to support and pass the proposed Hate Crimes Prevention Act
of 1999 that would strengthen federal investigative and prosecutorial action
against crimes motivated by hate, he said.

Vice President Al Gore, who later addressed the conference at a luncheon,
also promoted the legislation and Lee, who is awaiting congressional
confirmation to the Justice Department position.

"It's time for the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, and it's time for Bill Lann
Lee to be confirmed by the Senate. No racial profiling should be the first
civil-rights act of the new century," Gore told an applauding audience.

In a panel on bilingual education, state Sen. Mario Gallegos, D-Galena Park,
said he met with Gore and advised the vice president of his opposition to a
new Houston Independent School District policy that places children in
English-only classes as soon as they have tested proficient in reading the
language.

"This was from the English-only group that came last spring and met with
administrators and principals without telling any of us. These people are
going to towns and peddling English-only, and they are very sophisticated
and have a lot of money," Gallegos told the seminar.

"We want all our children to test (successfully) in English and succeed in
English. But we want it the right way and not rammed down our throats," he
said.