MINORITY DRIVERS FEEL LIKE MOVING TARGETS

Though details differ across the country, the basic story is the same: A
driver is stopped by a law enforcement officer, usually for a minor or even
non-existent traffic offense. After a brief conversation, the officer
casually asks permission to search the vehicle. An hour or more
later--after the search fails to uncover any drugs or other illegal
cargo--the driver is allowed to continue.

The distinguishing factor in most of these stories is that the drivers are
usually African-American, Hispanic or some other minority. Victims, in
fact, often describe the phenomenon as "driving while black," a sarcastic
twist on the offense of driving while intoxicated.

On Friday, nearly five years after the American Civil Liberties Union filed
a federal lawsuit against the Illinois State Police for such alleged
unprovoked stops of minority motorists, the ACLU added to the suit a
comprehensive statistical analysis that it says dramatically bolsters
anecdotal evidence in the case.

The suit is part of a growing legal caseload on the subject that has
already resulted in settlements in Pittsburgh and Maryland requiring police
to record racial data upon police stops so potential race-based stops can
be monitored. In addition, police in San Jose and San Diego have recently
agreed to collect such statistics in routine traffic stops.

The analysis in Illinois, gleaned from more than 6 million records obtained
from the state police, showed, for example, that from 1990 to 1995, some
Illinois state troopers assigned to the agency's drug interdiction unit
targeted Hispanic drivers at rates far higher than the proportionate number
of Hispanics on the road.

While Hispanics make up 7.9 percent of the Illinois population and
constitute 2.7 percent of personal vehicle trips in Illinois, nearly
one-third--30.3 percent--of certain stops involved Hispanics, according to
the analyses by a team of experts retained by the ACLU. The analysis looked
at the relatively small percentage of stops in which police do record
racial data.

State police spokesman Lincoln Hampton said because the materials were just
filed, he could only respond as the department has in the past to such
allegations: "When we make a stop, it's not based on race or gender or
anything of that nature. It's based on probable cause that some law is
being broken, whether it's traffic or otherwise. We have to have a reason."

The ACLU alleges that police use the technique to take advantage of drug
forfeiture laws that allow police to seize property-- cars or money, for
example-- found in a search that turns up drugs, even without a criminal
conviction.

Many of these searches, however, turn up nothing. In 1992, for example, the
state police drug interdiction unit reported stopping 28,807 vehicles and
conducting 5,109 searches. Seizures were made in 620 instances, and nothing
was seized in 4,489 searches, according to state police statistics.

At the time the suit was filed, Harvey Grossman, legal director of the
Illinois ACLU, said the agency had received reports from criminal defense
lawyers of minorities being stopped and questioned about drugs as well as
hundreds of complaints from motorists. He said the analysis paints a far
more detailed and damning picture.

For example, in 1992, when the state police conducted 5,109 searches, a
total of 4,042 were conducted after the drivers consented--an indication,
Grossman suggested in an interview on Friday, that the drivers had "nothing
to hide" and that most drivers believe they have no real choice but to assent.

At issue are officers assigned to the state police "Valkyrie" drug
interdiction unit, which was formed in 1990 to crack down on drug traffic.

Last year an African-American Miami-Dade police major was stopped because
of his race and later was convicted of resisting arrest when he cursed the
deputies who stopped him, grabbed his license back and demanded to speak to
a supervisor. A decade earlier police documented 1,100 videotaped stops
along Interstate Highway 95 and determined that while African-Americans and
Hispanics made up 5 percent of the drivers on the road, they made up 80
percent of those stopped and searched.

>From 1984 to 1988, Dr. Elmo Randolph, an African-American dentist from
Orange, N.J., was stopped about 100 times driving on the 148-mile stretch
of New Jersey Turnpike--also known as "White Man's Pass"--which connects to
New York City. He was never arrested.

Last summer, the FBI began investigating allegations that the all-white
police department in Trumbull, Conn., targets minorities after officers
released a 1993 memo from Police Chief Theodore Ambrosini that they said
encouraged racial profiling.

A bill sponsored by U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) that would require the
Department of Justice to collect from all police agencies racial and ethnic
data on motorists involved in stops was approved by the House last year but
died in a Senate committee. Conyers intends to reintroduce it. At the same
time, lawmakers in 12 states, including Illinois, are considering similar
measures.

In Illinois, a new seat-belt law proposed by House Speaker Michael Madigan
passed the House last week with the aid of the governor, and it now
advances to the Senate. The law would require state police and Chicago
police officers to record the race of every person to whom they issue a
written warning or citation.

Even if the bill passes, it would not render the lawsuit moot because the
suit seeks a much broader requirement: that race be noted on all
stops--even those where no citation or warning is written--and on all
searches.

The ACLU suit is expected to go to trial before U.S. District Judge Blanche
Manning sometime this summer.

In its most recent filing, the ACLU presented statistical analyses that
were conducted on three categories of data: 5.2 million reports of traffic
warnings and citations and 1.4 million field reports relating to searches
of vehicles.

Only field reports contain racial data. But even those reports only tell
part of the story. For example, in 1992, "Valkyrie" officers stopped 28,807
vehicles and conducted 5,109 searches, but they filed only 1,843 field
reports, according to the data.

"The state police has made conscious choices to avoid collection of
reasonable information to ensure that field enforcement does not
discriminate against minority motorists," declared Lou Reiter, former
deputy Los Angeles police chief and one of the ACLU experts.

Reiter and two other ACLU experts--James Ginger, director of the Center for
Justice Policy at St. Mary's University in San Antonio, and Martin Shapiro,
professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta--were able to reach
conclusions on the warnings and citations in relation to Hispanics by
extracting data through the use of a special Hispanic surname program
devised by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The ACLU lost a court battle to obtain a copy of Illinois driver's license
records for $500--instead of the $160,000 asked by the Illinois secretary
of state--which the agency intends to use to attempt some analysis of
African-Americans. The ACLU hopes to combine Social Security numbers from
driver's licenses with Social Security records, which often contain racial
data, to ferret out African-Americans from the citations and warnings records.

The experts compared the records of warnings, citations and field reports
from officers assigned to the "Valkyrie" unit to officers not assigned to
that unit and determined that some "Valkyrie" officers were responsible for
stopping Hispanics and African-Americans at rates far higher than the
percentage of those groups who are on the road.

For example, in the "Valkyrie" field reports studied from 1987 through
1997, the experts reported that 22.7 percent of those identified are
African-American, more than double the 10.3 percent of personal vehicle
trips accounted for by African-Americans, according to the analyses.

During that same period, "Valkyrie" field reports identified Hispanics in
21 percent of the reports, nearly eight times the 2.7 percent of personal
vehicle trips taken by Hispanics, according to the data.

In the state police district covering Will, Grundy and Kendall Counties,
"Valkyrie" field reports targeted African-Americans 27.5 percent of the
time and Hispanics 17.4 percent. In those counties, the African-American
driving population is 8.39 percent and the Hispanic driving population is
4.72 percent.

In the state police district that covers five Downstate counties--St.
Clair, Monroe, Clinton, Bond and Madison--"Valkyrie" officers in 1992
searched one out of every three vehicles stopped and found nothing in 20
out of every 21 cars, according to the records.

Prior to 1990, according to analysis, Hispanics made up 2 to 4 percent of
the motorists stopped and issued citations and warnings. After the
"Valkyrie" unit was formed in 1990, some of its officers typically stopped
Hispanics at a rate of two or three times higher than before, according to
the analyses.

In a deposition for the lawsuit, former state police director Terrance
Gainer denied that minorities were targeted for stops specifically because
of their race. He also said that he didn't believe African-American or
Hispanic drivers violated the law any more frequently than white drivers.

Still, Grossman said that for minority motorists, "It's the equivalent of
traveling in a totalitarian state where you are routinely stopped for
searches. It's like a tax for driving on the highway."