FIRING RENEWS POLICE DEBATE

Study: Minorities targeted for stops

Robert Wilkins, a black, Harvard-educated lawyer, could see this was no
ordinary speeding ticket. The Maryland State Police officers were taking
too long.

So he climbed out of the rented Cadillac that drizzly dawn in 1992 to find
officers questioning his cousin, the driver. Wilkins' aunt and uncle were
with them, returning from the Chicago funeral of Wilkins' grandfather.

`` `They want to search the car for drugs,' '' Wilkins recalls his cousin
saying.

Wilkins, a Washington lawyer, told the police they had no reason to suspect
a crime; he would not allow a search. So they detained the family for about
an hour so that a drug-sniffing dog could check the car.

``It was a very humiliating experience,'' he recalled Monday. ``We had to
stand out in the rain. The traffic passed and saw us standing there, like
criminals. The police just said it was standard policy.''

Wilkins sued, and Maryland's state police rules will never be the same.
Lawyers unearthed a police memo advising that ``drug couriers were likely
to be black males and females.'' The state settled the suit for $95,600.
The police agreed to retrain officers and take other steps to avoid
targeting members of racial minority groups on the road.

But the basic allegation -- that police single out minorities for car stops
- -- did not end there. It has arisen again and again, in class-action
lawsuits from Gloucester County, N.J., to Toledo, Ohio, to Eagle County,
Colo.; in a new suit in Maryland; in judges' findings; in calls for federal
legislation -- and now, in the firing of New Jersey's state police
superintendent, Col. Carl Williams.

Williams was fired Sunday by Gov. Christine Todd Whitman after saying in a
newspaper interview that he had warned his officers against profiling, but
that he believed minorities conduct most cocaine and marijuana trafficking.

His comments came as New Jersey officials are appealing a 1996 Superior
Court decision in which a Gloucester County judge threw out criminal
charges against 19 black drug defendants, saying the state police had
``allowed, condoned, cultivated and tolerated discrimination . . . in its
crusade to rid New Jersey of the scourge of drugs.''

The judge based his decision, in part, on research conducted by John
Lamberth, a Temple University professor who used a staff of observers in
Maryland and New Jersey to keep records of the racial composition of
motorists on the states' highways, and then compared them with police
records of traffic stops and vehicle searches.

In each case, Lamberth said Monday, his research found disproportionate
numbers of black and Latino motorists targeted by police.

Lamberth, widely seen as an expert on racial profiling, found that in New
Jersey, about 15 percent of motorists on the turnpike were black, but they
represented 35 percent of those pulled over by police.

Those figures were echoed in statistics released last month by New Jersey
Attorney General Peter Verniero, showing that in two months of 1997, three
of four turnpike drivers stopped by state police were minorities.

In Maryland, in 1996 and 1997, Lamberth's observers drove on Interstate 95
at 60 miles an hour, and noted something else: About 98 percent of the
other cars were speeding.

He found that although 17.5 percent of the traffic violators on I-95 north
of Baltimore were African-American, 29 percent of them were stopped, and
71.3 percent of those searched by state police were African-American.

Such statistics helped persuade U.S. District Judge Catherine Blake to rule
that the American Civil Liberties Union had made a ``reasonable showing''
that Maryland troopers on I-95 were continuing to engage in a ``pattern and
practice'' of racial discrimination, despite Wilkins' lawsuit settlement.

Last year, in response to concerns from lawmakers, the House passed a bill
to require the Justice Department to conduct a two-year, $500,000
nationwide study to determine whether blacks are being harassed through
routine vehicle checks. The bill did not pass the Senate.