Pubdate: Wed, 29 Nov 2000
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Copyright: 2000 San Francisco Chronicle
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Author: David Kocieniewski, New York Times

RACIAL PROFILING TIED TO WAR ON DRUGS

New Jersey Officials Say DEA Encouraged Tactic

Weaving its way through the 91,000 pages of documents on racial profiling 
released by New Jersey officials this week 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 argue 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 
instructed officers, to cite one example, that Latinos and West Indians 
dominated the drug trade and therefore warranted extra scrutiny.

Since then, the DEA and the U.S. 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 local 
police how to single out cars and drivers who are likely to be smuggling.

Among the characteristics they have trained officers to look for: people 
wearing dreadlocks and cars with two Latino males traveling together.

Federal officials contend they never taught racial profiling and that local 
departments using discriminatory tactics misapplied the DEA'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 receiving federal money for drug 
interdiction must keep track of the race of anyone stopped, searched or 
arrested by officers.

But even the American Civil Liberties Union, a persistent critic of state 
policies on racial profiling, said much of the blame for the policy falls 
on the DEA.

And in May 1998, as the U.S. Department of Justice was investigating 
whether the New Jersey State Police needed a federal monitor to oversee the 
department's efforts to deter profiling, Anthony Senneca, head of the DEA'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 shooting 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 the DEA had conveyed similar mixed 
messages across the country.

In response to that criticism, the Justice Department's Civil Rights 
Division reviewed DEA procedures, including the Operation Pipeline 
training, in 1997, said Kara Peterman, a department spokeswoman. She 
declined to characterize the findings, but two other federal officials said 
the department concluded the program was sound and that the DEA did not 
encourage or teach profiling.

New Jersey's attorney general, John Farmer Jr., offered an empathetic 
interpretation of the department's findings.

"In a lot of ways, the Justice Department in Washington has been going 
through what we in New Jersey went through," Farmer said yesterday. "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?"
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