NATION'S WAR ON DRUGS HAS INCREASED HIGHWAY STOPS BASED ON RACE, ACLU SAYS

Report Details Incidents To Rebut Police Denials

NEW YORK -- The war on drugs has significantly increased the number
of traffic stops based on race throughout the country, the American
Civil Liberties Union said in a report released yesterday.

"Skin color has become a substitute for evidence in a way that really
resembles Jim Crow justice on the nation's highways," ACLU Executive
Director Ira Glasser said.

The Drug Enforcement Administration's "Operation Pipeline" has trained
at least 27,000 law enforcement officials on how to spot drug couriers
on highways and has unfairly created a perception that blacks,
Hispanics and other minorities are more likely to possess drugs,
Glasser said.

The ACLU said the practice is so common that minority communities have
given it the derisive term "driving while black or brown." The ACLU
has filed lawsuits in Maryland, Illinois, New Jersey and Oklahoma
challenging racial profiling.

DEA officials in Washington did not return calls for comment.

The ACLU's 43-page report is largely a collection of case studies from
23 states rather than a statistical analysis.

It was released to rebut police denials that racial profiling exists,
said David Harris, a law professor at the University of Toledo in Ohio
and an author of the report.

"By laying out the facts in such detail in this report, we hope that
we can now get beyond `Is there really a problem?' to `What are we as
a nation going to do about it?' " Harris said. "We don't suggest that
this will be easy, only that it is necessary if we are to call
ourselves a democratic nation."

The ACLU is calling on police departments to voluntarily begin
documenting incidents of racial profiling.

In April, North Carolina became the first state to pass a law
requiring data collection on all traffic stops. Similar bills have
been introduced in Congress and in Arkansas, California, Connecticut,
Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island,
Texas and Virginia.