JUSTICE FOR ALL? NOT QUITE YET

It's a funny thing about words: sometimes, they convey meaning but not
necessarily understanding.

Take the term "racial profiling." Author Joseph Collum of Plantation says
the Oxford English Dictionary credits him with coining it in 1989 when he
was an investigative TV reporter in New Jersey. We all get its meaning: law
enforcement personnel targeting citizens by their skin color.

But to truly understand what racial profiling is, it helps to hear a story
like that of Chris Stubbs.

She was a 27-year-old black woman, driving home to North Carolina from New
York where she had gone to pick up $10,000 from a friend's brother; the
brother, who owned a car dealership, had agreed to stake Stubbs' dream of
opening a restaurant.

Stubbs was pulled over by a New Jersey state trooper who claimed her front
wheel was wobbling. She told him she had a spare.

He asked to search her vehicle. The trooper did his search and found the
brown paper bag full of cash.

"You know you're going to jail for this," he told her.

"For what?" she asked.

"For having all this money," he said.

Stubbs' car was driven to a state police barracks. The door panels were
removed, the carpet was lifted, every crevice was searched. Stubbs was
frisked, fingerprinted, photographed, interrogated, locked up.

And then, released. They'd found no drugs, charged her with no crime. They
had not so much as written her a ticket.

But troopers still kept the cash. If Stubbs wanted it back, they told her,
she'd have to hire a lawyer and prove it wasn't drug money.

If that story infuriates you, well, there's more where that came from.

Indeed, one reads Collum's new book, The Black Dragon: Racial Profiling
Exposed in a state of perpetual anger, amazement and fascination.

The book (yours truly provided a blurb that appears on the back cover)
reads like a particularly-addictive novel and you have to keep reminding
yourself that what you're reading actually happened, that it is not the
invention of some writer's imagination, that New Jersey troopers were
really this out of control, this unlawful, this willing to shred the United
States Constitution.

"It was right there for everybody to see on the side of the highway," says
Collum. "That's how we got on to it. I was the reporter for the
investigative unit and one of our assignment people used to come in
everyday and say, 'Hey, I saw it again. Troopers had a car over on the
side, all of the luggage out on the road, people sittin' on the guardrail.
And guess what? They were black.' "

Finally, Collum pulled arrest records for a single small town -- Leonia.

What he found stunned him. "Because, I think, 90 percent of the arrests the
previous year by the state police on the Turnpike through Leonia were black
or Hispanic. I said, 'Could this be true all up and down the Turnpike?' "

It was.

Jersey troopers were not interested in catching speeders or drunk drivers.
They were out to make drug busts. In the War on Drugs, that was the key to
career advancement and Trooper of the Year awards.

And the way you made those busts, the veteran cops taught the young ones,
was to "think dark," i.e, find reasons to stop drivers with brown skin.

Eventually, that advice would embarrass New Jersey before the nation.
Collum's TV news report led to a series of humiliating revelations,
hearings and a Justice Department consent decree. The Black Dragon is a
riveting account of that ordeal. It is also yet another piece of evidence
damning the War on Drugs as a war on people of color and their civil
liberties.

We say we are a nation of liberty and justice for all.

But, again, it's a funny thing about words -- even those words. Yes, we all
get the meaning. But Collum's book suggests some of us are still a little
fuzzy on the understanding.