Pubdate: Thu, 05 Oct 2000 Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA) Copyright: 2000 San Jose Mercury News Contact: 750 Ridder Park Drive, San Jose, CA 95190 Fax: (408) 271-3792 Website: http://www.sjmercury.com/ Author: Benjamin Weiser, New York Times REPORT: N.Y. COPS SINGLED OUT BLACKS, LATINOS Federal Probe Shows Special Unit Engaged In 'Racial Profiling' As A Search Criterion NEW YORK -- A federal investigation of the New York Police Department's Street Crime Unit has determined that its officers engaged in so-called racial profiling as they conducted their aggressive campaign of street searches across the city, officials said. Prosecutors in Manhattan, who began their investigation in the weeks after the 1999 shooting death of Amadou Diallo, are now in talks with the administration of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to discuss their findings and perhaps to negotiate a set of changes that would avert a lawsuit, the officials said. If the talks fail, the officials said, prosecutors could seek authorization from Attorney General Janet Reno to go to court under civil rights law and ask a judge to order broad changes in the operations of the Street Crime Unit and possible oversight by a federal monitor. Prosecutors have based their findings on a statistical analysis of the Street Crime Unit's searches of people its officers had stopped because they were suspected of committing crimes or carrying guns, one official said. The analysis concluded that blacks and Latinos in the city were disproportionately singled out in the searches, and that the imbalance could not be explained by the fact that the city's minority neighborhoods typically had higher crime rates. Mary Jo White, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, whose office made the finding, would not comment other than to say her office's investigation was continuing. Giuliani and police have in the past adamantly rejected allegations of racial profiling. They did so when New York state Attorney General Eliot L. Spitzer issued a report late last year saying the department's street-search tactics unfairly singled out the city's black and Latino residents. The Street Crime Unit -- squads of elite undercover officers that were sent into high-crime sections of the city -- was seen by the department as one of its great successes, the unit's ability to get guns off the street having played a large role in reducing crime. The performance and conduct of the unit came under intense scrutiny after Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant, was shot to death in the hallway of his Bronx apartment building by four members of the unit. - --- MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens