VICTIMS IN THE WAR BACK HOME

Wars on crime have collateral damage too.

That was not the theme of U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno's speech to the
National Press Club last week, but it might as well have been.

In her strongest statement yet on the subject, Reno announced new steps to
restore trust between police and minority communities. Among other moves,
she planned to include questions about police behavior in the Department of
Justice's annual Crime Victimization Survey. It would be the federal
government's first national measure of how often police abuses occur.

To no one's surprise, police groups opposed the move, which made me wonder
what they want to hide. We expect the military to account for its
collateral. Why shouldn't the police?

"Collateral damage," the military's euphemism for the accidental
destruction of civilian lives and property in war, sounds cynical.

Yet its sober tone addresses a cruel fact of war: a certain number of
people are going to be killed or injured, even by those who are trying to
help them.

So it is with wars on crime. How many innocent people are we willing to
abuse as we pursue criminals?

While Reno spoke in Washington, thousands marched in New York City to
protest the death of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant who died
in a hail of 41 bullets fired by police who mistook him for a rape suspect.

As with most such racial eruptions, the rift is not just about Diallo. It
is about New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's get-tough crackdowns on
crimes varying in seriousness from drugs to jaywalking.

While New York City has become a national model for the reduction of crime
and the restoration of street civility in the 1990s, it also has become a
symbol for long-standing resentments between police and some of those whom
they are assigned to serve and protect. Under Giuliani, for example, a
disproportionate number of innocent blacks and Hispanics have been stopped
for every one who has been caught with a gun, drugs or other contraband.

Similar findings have turned up in other states. Last week, law-enforcement
officials shut down 11 miles of the New Jersey Turnpike to re-enact a 1998
shooting that raised a controversy over racial "profiling" by state police.

"Profiling" is the controversial practice of using race or ethnicity as
clues to criminality. A New Jersey judge concluded in 1996 that troopers
were illegally targeting black motorists after finding blacks were almost
five times as likely as whites to be stopped.

Elsewhere, when Maryland state police agreed as part of a court settlement
to track the race of drivers and troopers stopped and searched on a stretch
of Interstate Highway 95, they found blacks comprised only 17 percent of
the drivers but more than 70 percent of the police stops.

In another example, the Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties
Union found that blacks and Hispanics were more likely than white drivers
to be stopped by the drug interdiction unit of the Illinois State Police.

"Some people, especially those in minority communities are wondering
whether our success in reducing crime has been due to overly aggressive
police officers who ignore the civil liberties of minorities," Reno said.

That's an understatement. In some circles of African-American life,
"profiling" has been around long enough to be called "driving while black,"
a sarcastic takeoff on the offense of driving while intoxicated.

Reno endorsed legislation proposed by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) to
require all police to record the race, among other characteristics, of
every person they stop on the highway.

Similar legislation passed the House last year, then died in the Senate.
Fierce opposition came from such police groups as the National Association
of Police Organizations. Robert Scully, the association's executive
director, fears such data will be exploited by "the cottage industry of
lawyers who make their living suing police officers across the country."

Perhaps. But those lawyer represent people who have a right to be
represented. We should support our police, but when they run roughshod over
basic rights, they need to be reined in and, if necessary, disciplined.

When Giuliani criticizes the rise in irresponsible rhetoric around the
Diallo case, he has a point. But, he, too, has contributed to the rhetoric
by, among other excesses, referring to the protesters as "silly."

Sillier is the belief that one can have an effective war on crime when the
heaviest collateral damage is being felt by the people who need the
protecting.