Pubdate: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 Source: New York Times (NY) Copyright: 2000 The New York Times Company Contact: 229 West 43rd Street, New York, NY 10036 Fax: (212) 556-3622 Website: http://www.nytimes.com/ Forum: http://forums.nytimes.com/comment/ Author: David Kocieniewski U.S. WROTE OUTLINE FOR RACE PROFILING, NEW JERSEY ARGUES TRENTON, Nov. 28 - Weaving its way through the 91,000 pages of documents on racial profiling released by New Jersey officials is a largely overlooked thread in the national debate on race and crime - although states like New Jersey have been the most egregious offenders, the textbook on singling out minority drivers was written by the federal government. New Jersey officials contend that the reason racial profiling is a national problem is that it was initiated, and in many ways encouraged, by the federal government's war on drugs. In 1986, the Drug Enforcement Administration's Operation Pipeline enlisted police departments across the country to search for narcotics traffickers on major highways and told officers, to cite one example, that Latinos and West Indians dominated the drug trade and therefore warranted extra scrutiny. Since then, the D.E.A. and the Department of Transportation have financed and taught an array of drug interdiction programs that emphasize the ethnic and racial characteristics of narcotics organizations and teach the police ways to single out cars and drivers who are smuggling. Among the characteristics officers in Operation Pipeline have been trained to look for: people with dreadlocks and cars with two Latino males traveling together. Federal officials contend that they have never taught profiling and that police departments that use racially discriminatory tactics are misapplying the D.E.A.'s intelligence reports. Federal officials have taken several steps in recent years intended to measure the problem, most notably President Clinton's 1999 executive order that any police force that receives federal money for drug interdiction must keep track of the race of anyone stopped, searched or arrested by officers. But even the national American Civil Liberties Union, a persistent critic of state policies on racial profiling, said much of the blame for the policy fell on the Drug Enforcement Administration. And in May 1998, as the Department of Justice was investigating whether the New Jersey State Police needed a federal monitor to oversee its efforts to deter profiling, Anthony J. Senneca, agent in charge of the D.E.A.'s Newark office, wrote to state police officials to praise the troopers' methods and effectiveness on the turnpike. The letter singled out the exemplary work of five troopers, including John Hogan, who one month earlier was involved in the April 1998 shootings of three unarmed minority men on the New Jersey Turnpike, an incident that propelled racial profiling onto the nation's political agenda. David Harris, a University of Toledo law professor who has written extensively about racial profiling, said that the Drug Enforcement Administration had conveyed similar mixed messages across the country and that results of the Operation Pipeline training had led to discrimination in states as diverse as Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico and Texas. In response to that criticism, the Department of Justice's civil rights division reviewed D.E.A. procedures, including the Operation Pipeline training, in 1997, according to Kara Peterman, a department spokeswoman. She declined to characterize the findings. But two other federal officials said the Justice Department had concluded that the program was sound and that the Drug Enforcement Administration did not encourage or teach profiling. Civil rights advocates say the Justice Department's response stemmed from a reluctance to criticize an agency it oversees. But New Jersey's attorney general, John J. Farmer Jr., offers a more empathetic interpretation. "In a lot of ways, the Justice Department in Washington has been going through what we in New Jersey went through," Mr. Farmer said today. "The troopers in the field were given a mixed message. On one hand, we were training them not to take race into account. On the other hand, all the intelligence featured race and ethnicity prominently. So what is your average road trooper to make of all this?" Few in law enforcement foresaw such an outcome in 1986, when Operation Pipeline began as a way to use municipal police departments as an aggressive force in the national crusade against drugs. The program, which has been used to train more than 25,000 officers in 48 states, offered the police access to Drug Enforcement Administration intelligence reports, which included detailed descriptions of ethnic drug gangs and the cartels. As early as 1987, however, those D.E.A. updates had been transformed into questionable tactics in New Jersey. One 1987 state police training memo listed the following as identifiers of possible drug couriers: Colombian males, Hispanic males, a Hispanic male and a black male together, or a Hispanic male and female posing as a couple. Officially, the state police were on record as stating that racial profiling was illegal and prohibited. But in a 1999 memo, Deputy Attorney General Debra L. Stone said her investigation of the force found that in the patrol cars and on the state's highways, "racial profiling exists as part of the culture." "There's no written policy on it," she said, "but you are taught that if you see `Johnnies' in a `good car,' they don't belong and should be stopped." Mr. Harris, who wrote the A.C.L.U. report titled "Driving While Black," said a similar pattern of official denials and de facto profiling cropped up in many states where Operation Pipeline was embraced by local commanders. "The D.E.A. has been the great evangelizer for racial profiling on the highways," he said. "They had used the technique in airports to nab drug couriers and thought this held great promise on the highways. So they taught it to local departments, and because the D.E.A. agents weren't the ones actually pulling over the cars, they've never been really held accountable for it." Drug Enforcement Administration officials emphatically dispute the notion that they taught or encouraged unequal enforcement of the law. Michael Chapman, a D.E.A. spokesman, said today that the agency trained officers not to consider race when deciding whether to pull over a car and to use it as only one of many factors when considering whether to search a vehicle. "We teach them that profiling is illegal and it is also bad investigative technique," Mr. Chapman said. Nonetheless, much of the Drug Enforcement Administration's emphasis on the race and ethnicity of drug traffickers endures. During the last five years, the D.E.A. has stopped distributing training videos in which all the drug suspects have Spanish surnames. But just last year, the agency's Newark office released the "Heroin Trends" report, which noted: "Predominant wholesale traffickers are Colombian, followed by Dominicans, Chinese, West African/Nigerian, Pakistani, Hispanic and Indian. Midlevels are dominated by Dominicans, Colombians, Puerto Ricans, African-Americans and Nigerians." Meanwhile, federal agencies like the Department of Transportation have also sponsored drug interdiction programs that make similar observations. And a 1998 report by Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, stunned New Jersey officials because it gave detailed breakdowns of the ethnic and racial backgrounds of sellers, traffickers and users alike. Hugh B. Price, president and chief executive of the National Urban League, said today that he hoped that the public attention focused on New Jersey's racial profiling would induce the federal government to address the causes of racial profiling as well as the symptoms, even if part of the blame lay within the Justice Department itself. "These are federal civil rights that are at risk and are undermined, and we want the federal government to put force on this issue," Mr. Price said. - --- MAP posted-by: Jo-D