DRIVING WHILE WHITE

Just like the blacks and Hispanics we've been reading about lately I get
pulled over once in a while by the cops and it's clear they think I'm a
possible drug transporter. I make a distinction here between the pretext
stops and the speeding offenses. Drive over 75 miles an hour regularly and
you'll get a ticket once in while. And since everyone in America except
People carrying high explosives drives at some point over 75 mph, everyone
in America, at some point, gets a ticket.

I commute fairly regularly between Petrolia in Humboldt County and Berkeley,
a distance of about 350 miles. The other day I was driving a 1964 Newport
Station wagon north and was astounded suddenly to see a red light go on
behind me, somewhere near Ukiah, and a pissy young CHP (California Highway
Patrol,) officer, on the short side, come around to the passenger door hand
on holster.

By the time a police officer reaches the passenger door any prudent driver
should already have license, registration and proof of insurance held
between finger and thumb, with both hands high on the driving wheel and no
sudden movements, thus hopefully averting what we may term the Diallou
Effect. I did everything wrong, the reason being that the ziplock bag
holding my papers was under the driver's seat and, so contrary, to
procedures just outlined, I was bowed down with my head under the steering
wheel trying to find the bag. The officer
stared tensely as I finally surfaced with the bag and leaned over to try and
get the passenger door open. This is a station wagon that had been sitting
in a field for the preceding six years. All the door locks except for the
driver's side, had frozen. There had been a wood rat nest in the glove
compartment, which was why the papers were under the seat. The passenger
door handle broke when, I tried to wrench it open.

Finally I got the passenger window down. The cop said, as though already
testifying in court, that he had been heading south, rounding a bend and had
seen me come the other way, overtaking a car as I did so, in the outside lane.

At this point a CHP officer will usually have sized you up, figured you are
no major menace to civilization, not drunk and --computer check on license
pending -- maybe not the big catch of the evening. Courteous behavior by the
driver usually yields rewards, with the ticket written up for 72 mph instead
of a reckless driving citation
for going over 90. I was polite, peppering my remarks with "officer."

It got me nowhere.

"I'm going to my car to write the citation," he snapped. His costume was the
blue fatigue jumpsuit that the French riot police used to wear back in the
1960s. He had a particularly large gun. Off he trotted to run my license and
after five minutes came back with a ticket accusing me of driving at 78
miles an hour, a speed which, he remarked, he would have thought "this old
car" incapable. "Did you just eyeball the car and get me on the radar?" I
asked, and he, rather too quickly, said "radar." This seemed to me
intrinsically unlikely, given the circumstances.

The problem here is that the California Highway Patrol has organized things
so that now local counties get a larger cut of the fine. If no one drove
over the limit in California there would be an immediate cash crunch in the
administration of the state. Speeding, is therefore a civic duty.

The fines are getting higher and higher too, with add-ons and extra
penalties and special taxes and fines of one sort and other, so that running
an amber light (not my particular specialty) can see the offender writing
out a check for $150 by the time it's all over.

The pretext stops, as related to the drug war, are of a different order.
Three years ago I was driving a 1972 Imperial two-door hardtop, known to the
cognoscenti at the time as a hardtop convertible, across the country and was
driving along Interstate 90 through Montana.

Not far out of Butte I could see a state trooper behind me. He kept his car
just to my left rear so that my natural reaction was to run a little further
right to the edge of the inside lane. Suddenly his light went on. A trim
28-year old with a slightly less trim 26-year old trainee beside him, the
trooper said that I had driven across the inside white line of the
interstate verge. This was the pretext

If possible, though these days they tell you urgently to stay in your car,
get out and stand at an equal setting with the cop. This I did. He hemmed
and hawed a bit and after a while asked if I was carrying large sums of
money. I laughed and said "I wish." By this time we'd gravitated to the back
end of the car and he was looking hopefully at the trunk. Was I carrying
arms? Absolutely not. Truth be told, I remembered I had half a bottle of gin
in the trunk and wondered whether it was illegal in the state of Montana.

Now, there are a million ways he could have got me to open the think, even
without a search warrant starting with the simple statement that he feared
for his life. But instead he blurted out hopefully, "Are you carrying large
amounts of drugs? "No." Well, though unshaven, wearing dark glasses and
driving a boat, he didn't order me to open up. Maybe it's because I'd told
him I was a writer. He saw a red stain on my fingers and cried out, "Is
that blood?" I said no, it was ink and showed him the fountain pen and that
broke his spirit.

Off I went down the interstate and the same thing happened all over again
half an hour later, with a cop trying to ride me over the inside line,
except that this time I held to the middle of the lane and we drove in that
condition for 30 minutes until he gave up. Last fall, with Barbara Yaley in
a 64 New Yorker, the same thing happened in Montana on Route 2, and we got
stopped and cased by cops in Washington State and in Oregon, each time on
flimsy pretexts.

Here's where we get to Operation Pipeline, as described by Gary Webb in this
month's Esquire. Webb needs no introduction. He's the reporter who wrote up
the CIA-contra drug connection in the San Jose Mercury News, in 1996 and got
hammered by the Agency's pals in the press. When Webb was down, driven out
of his own paper and working for the state of California as an investigator,
Esquire published a fine story describing how he'd been screwed. Now Esquire
has Webb back in harness describing a federal program called Operation Pipeline.

"It's clear enough to me that Pipeline is why I was stopped in Montana,
Washington and Oregon, and why, for every middle class white guy like
myself, a hundred blacks or Hispanics are pulled over. Operation Pipeline
takes us beyond the basic "driving while black" scenarios that presume that
cops pull over people merely because they are black or brown and show that
millions and millions of federal DEA dollars and training sessions by the
thousand have sent cops out on the roads alert for the trace signs that
spell "drug carrier." Webb came across the program while he was working for
the state of California. He says that "police commands in 48 states now
participate in Pipeline in some fashion."

It took shape with a Florida cop called Robert Vogel, a "good cop," in that
he did have a sensitive eye to who on Florida's I-95, might be in line for a
stop and a search. Of course, as Webb makes amusingly and brutally clear,
Vogel is a good old boy whose basic criteria are, stop and hassle the blacks
and the browns, but these basic data were adorned with other criteria, as
formulated by Vogel and refined by other police instructors: - Will a
driver make eye contact with the cop driving in the next lane, a cop,
furthermore, who's eyeballing him? No eye contact increases the chance of
the red light going on. So do hands high on the wheel in the ten-to-two
position, knuckles white and, presumably, an over orderly speed.
- - Air fresheners, laundry detergent, fabric softeners. (I always have these
on long trips. You need to wash your clothes, no?)
- - Fast food wrappers on the floor. This is evidence of "hard travel." Search
every driver in America.
- - Maps with cities circled. Drug drops.
- - Tools on the floor. New tires on an old car. High mileage on a new car.
- - Single key in the ignition.
- - Rental cars. (In my case, a Vermont registration, but California license
and insurance.)
- - Signs of fear, unease. Pornography. Young women.

The DEA, Webb writes, took up Vogel's profiling in 1987. It wasn't long
before cops in every state were using the vehicle laws as the pretext. Every
state has them. Any cop can stop you for a thousand different reasons: dirty
license tags, a brake light burned out, almost anything you could dream of.
So you get stopped. There's
dialogue. The cop sizes you up. Let Webb tell it in his own words: "If your
indicators are on the high side, however, this is what will happen. You'll
be given your papers back, and then the officer will hang around and strike
up a conversation. What most drivers don't realize is that at this point,
they have magically crossed into a whole new legal universe. At the moment
your license and registration is returned, you are technically free to
leave. In the eye of the law, the traffic stop is over. Now you and Officer
Friendly are just having a "consensual" chat. And your new friend is free to
ask anything.

"From here, it's almost a script.

"You'll be told that the local police have been having a problem with people
ferrying guns and drugs along this part of the highway, but they're doing
their best to stop it. Good, you may say. Glad to hear it. The officer will
nod and say he's happy to see it that way. By the way, you wouldn't happen
to have any guns or drugs in your car, would you?

"Me? you will ask. Oh, no. Of course not.

"The officer will look at you and say, Then you don't mind if I take a
look-see do you?

"If you're like nine out of ten people who get asked this question, you'll
gulp and say, No, no, officer, go right ahead. "You'll be asked to
consent--orally or on paper-- to a search, but don't think too hard or
hesitate to comply, because those are more indicators of drug trafficking,
as is refusing to allow the search. 'If they refuse, the stuffs in the
trunk,' our CHP instructor tells us matter-of-factly. A refusal justifies
calling out the-dogs and letting a drug-sniffing canine take a walk around
your car. If Fido gets a whiff of something, the cop doesn't need your
permission anymore.

"Most drivers consent. This can authorize a complete search of everything,
including your luggage and person. It allows the officer to literally to
take your car apart with an air hammer, which has happened. One of the CHP's
first Pipeline officers Richard Himbarger, was legendary for carrying an
electric screwdriver in his patrol car and removing heater ducts, fenders,
trunk lids, and interior body panels by the side of the road.

"Once they've given consent' our CHP instructor tell us, 'they've dug their
own grave."

This battlefront of the drug war has notoriously reached the courts and the
front pages. The Maryland cops made the biggest mistake in 1992 when they
pulled over and hassled a black family, thus provoking a counterattack by
one of the hassled, Harvard law grad Robert Wilkins, a public defender,
whose suit forced the Maryland cops to
admit that out of 732 people detained and searched in 1995 and 1996, 75 per
cent were black and 5 per cent Hispanic.

The law suits are mounting. Laws are being put at the state and federal
level to inhibit racial profiling. Police forces -- the CHP for example --
are reassessing the way they administer Pipeline. But in terms of police
abuse of powers the situation is getting worse.

In 1996 the US Supreme Court okayed Vogel's method of stopping people for
minor breaches of the vehicle codes in order to check for drugs. Scalia
wrote the opinion, saying it was not the role of the Court to say whether
there were too many trivial traffic laws on the books. Webb reports that
after this case, known as the Whren decision, a CHP instructor told him,
"After Whren, the game was over. We won." Two weeks ago Scalia wrote another
opinion, this time okaying the search of passengers in a car, without a warrant.

Goodbye Fourth Amendment, unless, as the first Court decision suggested, the
pretexts are taken away. There will, I think, be new laws. Stop a thousand
black people and you're bound to snag a cop or two, a lawyer or two and in
the end someone -- and many now have been helped by the ACLU -- will fight
back. Police chiefs and attorney General Janet Reno are expressing concern.
My question: where the hell is the best value-for-money organization in
America, the AAA? It needs heat too, since it should be protecting all its
members. (Remember,
the most effective organizations in America are in the front of the phone
book, the AA, the AAA and the AARP, After the AAs and AAAs people lose heart.)

From, "National Notes"
By, Alexander Cockburn
Anderson Valley Advertiser
Booneville CA