TEXAS POLICE SEARCHES SUGGEST PROFILING

AUSTIN - A study commissioned by minority advocacy groups released Thursday
found that police throughout Texas stop and search black and Latino drivers
at higher rates than whites but that officers are more likely to find
drugs, guns and other contraband on whites.

The study, called "Don't Mind If I Take a Look, Do Ya?," examined 2003
statistics provided by 1,060 law enforcement agencies on consensual
searches of vehicles during traffic stops and how often contraband was
found. It said three out of five law enforcement agencies reported
conducting searches of minority drivers at higher rates than whites. In
addition, of the agencies that searched blacks and Latinos at higher rates,
51 percent found contraband on whites at a higher rate than on blacks,
while 58 percent found contraband in the possession of whites at higher
rates than on Latinos.

Although sponsors of the study admitted that discrepancies exist in how the
local police agencies analyzed and reported their data, they said overall,
the statistics show a pattern of racial profiling.

"You're wasting a lot of resources that obviously can be used to fight
crime elsewhere, and you're subjecting a lot of people to unnecessary
searches," said Scott Henson, director of the police accountability project
for the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas.

The report said the overwhelming majority of law enforcement agencies
"provided no mitigating information or insight to explain disparate search
rates between Anglos and minorities."

The racial profiling report is the second commissioned by the ACLU, the
League of United Latin American Citizens, the Texas Criminal Justice
Coalition and the Texas State Conference of NAACP Branches. The first
report, released a year ago, was based on information provided by 413 law
enforcement agencies. That study found that three out of four agencies
pulled over minority drivers at higher rates than whites and that six in
seven agencies searched blacks and Latinos at a higher rate during those
traffic stops.

New Jersey, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Hawaii have banned consensual
searches after controversies about racial profiling, and the California
Highway Patrol ended the practice as part of a lawsuit settlement. Will
Harrell, the executive director of the Texas office of the ACLU, said he
supported a law to ban such searches in Texas.

The head of a research center on racial profiling said the Texas data
reflects national trends, but he warned against making sweeping conclusions
from raw stop-and-search data. Jack McDevitt, director of the Institute on
Race and Justice at Northeastern University in Boston, also said banning
consensual searches is not a panacea to the problem of racial profiling.