VAN SHOOTING REVIVES CHARGES OF RACIAL 'PROFILING' BY N.J. STATE POLICE

The furor over an incident in which two New Jersey State Police officers
fired 11 shots into a van during a traffic stop comes against a backdrop of
years of allegations that troopers in New Jersey have illegally used
race-based profiles to stop black and Hispanic drivers in hope of making
drug arrests.

In the incident on April 23, Troopers John Hogan and James Kenna stopped a
van carrying four New York City men, including Danny Reyes, 20, who is
Hispanic. The others, Keshon Moore, 22, the driver; Rayshawn Brown, 20, and
Leroy Grant, 23, are black. Three of the men were wounded in the shootings,
two seriously.

Police contend they stopped the van because it was speeding. As they
approached the van on foot, they said, it went into reverse, striking Hogan
and prompting the troopers to open fire. But the occupants of the van say
that they were not speeding and that the van went into reverse by accident.

Johnnie Cochran, the high-profile defense lawyer, has entered the case,
citing the state's record and charging that the shooting was a result of
racial profiling. "This is a case of young men driving while black or
brown," he said at a news conference Friday.

That charge was at the center of the court case that led a Superior Court
judge to conclude in 1996 that the New Jersey State Police had a policy of
"selective enforcement" by "targeting blacks for investigation and arrest."

The ruling followed one of the state's longest evidentiary hearings -- six
months of testimony and 200 exhibits, many of them statistical surveys of
drivers and traffic stops on the southernmost 26-mile stretch of the New
Jersey Turnpike. Judge Robert Francis found that troopers looking for drug
suspects had pulled over an inordinate number of black drivers over a
three-year period simply because of their race.

"It basically confirms what attorneys throughout the state have known for a
long time, that the state police have been targeting minority motorists,"
said Gloucester County Public Defender P. Jeffrey Wintner. He succeeded in
getting the evidence thrown out in the cases of 19 black suspects who had
been stopped on that stretch of the turnpike and charged with drug offenses.

The traffic survey that was central to the defense of the 19 suspects was
perhaps the most thorough documentation of the contention that the police
regularly pulled over black drivers, particularly young men, because the
police thought they were likely to be involved in the drug trade.

The survey first determined that some 98 percent of all the drivers along
the stretch of the turnpike were going over the speed limit of 55 miles per
hour, giving the police latitude to stop virtually anybody. The survey found
that while 13.5 percent of the drivers on the stretch of highway were black,
46 percent of those halted by the police over a 40-month period were black.
"They were pulling over blacks out of all proportion to the population of
the turnpike," said Fred Last, a public defender who helped design the
survey.

Dr. John Lamberth of Temple University, who conducted the survey, said the
disparities in the statistics were so huge they precluded any probability of
coincidence.

"The normal statistical signal for that is .05," he recalled in a recent
telephone interview. "The difference in these results was so wide, so big, I
couldn't even get the computer to spit out a number. It poured out like 32
zeros, and we still hadn't gotten a number yet. These were things we just
don't see, its so far off the wall."

Francis agreed, saying: "The statistical disparities are indeed stark." He
added that the "utter failure" of police commanders to monitor the arrests
or "investigate the many claims of institutional discrimination, manifests
its indifference if not acceptance."

The New Jersey State Police have consistently denied that troopers stop
drivers on the basis of their race.

But one striking result of the survey, both the judge and Lamberth noted,
was that troopers using radar tended to stop black drivers at near their
rate in the highway population, while the troopers on road patrol cruising
without radar, who could more freely choose who to stop, arrested far more
blacks.

"As they got more discretion, they stopped more blacks," Lamberth said. "It
is a telling argument that they are profiling. They get promoted on the
basis of the number of arrests they make, and there is the general mythology
that blacks are more likely than whites to have contraband."

The controversy over profiling is not limited to New Jersey. Katheryn
Russell, a criminology professor at the University of Maryland, writes of
the frequency with which black men are subjected to traffic stops in a book
on race relations, "The Color of Crime" (New York University Press, 1998).

"It seems that no matter what black men do in their cars, they are targets
for criminal suspicion," she writes. "It is so commonplace for black men to
be pulled over in their vehicles that this practice has acquired its own
acronym: DWB (Driving While Black)."

David Rocah, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union in Newark,
N.J., cited similar cases in Delaware, Florida, Pennsylvania and Illinois.
"The very fact that it has a name -- DWB -- should tell you something,"
Rocah said. "This is documented in study after study. Driving is a
completely disparate experience for whites and minorities."

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company

Checked-by: "Rolf Ernst"