Pubdate: Wed, 16 May 2001
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2001 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Lori Montgomery, Washington Post Staff Writer

RACIAL PROFILING IN MARYLAND DEFIES DEFINITION -- OR SOLUTION

Last year, Maryland state troopers searched 533 cars on Interstate 95. More 
than half of the drivers were black. Ten percent were Hispanic. In all, 63 
percent of drivers forced out of their cars were minorities.

The Maryland chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and more than 
140 minority drivers who claim in two separate lawsuits to be victims of 
racial profiling by the Maryland State Police look at the numbers and see 
clear evidence of racial bias. Police officials look at the same numbers 
and see nothing wrong.

Six years after the ACLU forced the Maryland State Police to become the 
first major police agency in the country to collect data on highway traffic 
stops, two things are clear: Maryland troopers continue to stop and search 
minority drivers at rates far higher than their numbers on the highway can 
explain. And the two sides are at a virtual impasse about where to go from 
here.

Yesterday, Maryland became the 13th state to enact legislation addressing 
racial profiling as Gov. Parris N. Glendening signed a bill that outlaws 
race-based traffic stops and requires state and municipal police to record 
and report the ethnicity of every motorist they pull over.

"It is simply outrageous that African Americans are being targeted for 
traffic stops. We know it does happen. And under this bill, it is illegal 
and it will stop," Glendening said at a bill-signing ceremony packed with 
jubilant black lawmakers.

But the assertion that the new law will change police behavior is 
challenged by the recent history of the Maryland State Police. And the 
Maryland experience holds a harsh lesson for minorities hoping for clear 
answers as hundreds of police agencies across the country begin to collect 
data in an effort to ferret out racial bias.

Since 1995, under the oversight of a federal judge, the Maryland agency has 
pursued a thorough campaign to combat racial profiling. It has assembled 
one of the most comprehensive statistical portrait of highway stops of any 
police agency in the country. It has prohibited troopers from using race as 
a factor to gauge criminal behavior. It has installed video cameras in 
patrol cars in the most troublesome barracks. And it has required troopers 
to have an "articulable suspicion" of criminal activity before they ask a 
driver to consent to a vehicle search.

In short, it has done everything the new law demands and more. The result?

"We have five or six years of data showing gross racial disparity in who's 
stopped on the interstate," said Deborah Jeon, an attorney with the 
Maryland ACLU. "Getting at the problem is just much more difficult than 
keeping data and putting out a piece of paper that says, 'Don't do it.' "

Since 1999, 10 states including Maryland have enacted laws requiring data 
collection; three more passed laws to eliminate racial profiling. In 
addition, data collection bills are close to being passed in Colorado and 
Texas. And the federal government and dozens of municipal and state 
agencies have begun keeping statistics, many voluntarily.

Other agencies are under legal mandate to collect traffic data. Since last 
fall, Montgomery County officers have been required to record the racial 
characteristics of every motorist they stop. The rules are part of the 
settlement of a four-year civil rights probe by the U.S. Justice Department.

The numbers are slowly rolling in. As they do, they are raising difficult 
questions about exactly how to recognize racial profiling.

Should the percentage of minorities stopped by police be measured against 
their presence in the local population? Or should there be some effort to 
find out how many minorities are speeding along in the flow of traffic? 
Should vehicle searches be tracked as an important measure of profiling?

Across the country, police and community representatives are just beginning 
to grapple with those issues, as well as more fundamental concerns about 
the accuracy and completeness of the data collected.

In Houston, for example, where Mayor Lee Brown initiated a voluntary data 
collection program in 1999, a recent study by the Houston Chronicle found 
that police failed to record the race of the driver in hundreds of 
thousands of traffic stops, making a meaningful analysis virtually impossible.

"Unfortunately, in a lot of places where data collection has been mandated, 
police are not going the extra step to develop benchmarks" to accurately 
measure racial disparity, said Temple University professor John Lamberth, 
one of the country's premier analysts of traffic-stop statistics. "A lot of 
places are reporting the data, and then the question becomes, 'What does it 
mean?' And no one seems to know."

That problem has become almost intractable in Maryland. Here, the state's 
trove of data allows virtually any statistical question to be asked and 
answered. Yet despite intense settlement negotiations between police and 
the ACLU, the two sides still cannot agree on whether racial profiling 
exists and, if so, what to do about it.

Police officials are just as frustrated by the stalemate as the ACLU and 
its plaintiffs.

"We feel we're doing all we can do and the numbers are purely what the 
numbers are," said Lt. Col. William Arrington, chief of the field 
operations bureau, who is black.

Police point out that they stop far more white drivers than black ones and 
that they search only a fraction of the thousands of vehicles they stop. 
They do a search, they say, either because the trooper notices clear 
evidence of wrongdoing (the smell of marijuana smoke through a lowered 
window) or because they have a reasonable suspicion that criminal activity 
is afoot (the driver's name is not listed on the car's rental agreement) 
and the driver consents. For a consent search, police are not required by 
law to have a reason for the search.

Why do minorities suffer the majority of police searches?

"I don't know," Arrington said. "But it does not suggest a problem to me."

Arrington noted that since 1999, video cameras have recorded every traffic 
stop made by troopers from the JFK Memorial Highway barracks in Cecil 
County, near the Delaware line. That barracks has been the focus of the 
ACLU's most intense scrutiny. None of the videos, Arrington said, has shown 
"a trooper acting inappropriately."

The legal battle began in May 1992, when a Harvard University-educated 
public defender was stopped in Cumberland, Md., while driving from a 
funeral in Chicago back home to the District. Robert L. Wilkins refused to 
consent to a police search, and he and and three relatives were held for 
almost an hour while a state trooper called a police dog to sniff the car 
for drugs.

Wilkins was convinced that the trooper stopped the car because his family 
is black. Later, he obtained a confidential state police report urging 
troopers in Western Maryland to be on the lookout for black drug 
traffickers in rental cars with Virginia tags, similar to the car Wilkins 
and his family were traveling in.

He contacted the ACLU and filed suit in 1993. The state police quickly 
offered to settle for $50,000, but Wilkins held out for a promise that 
police would track traffic stops to determine whether troopers were 
targeting people for "driving while black."

The settlement was signed in 1995. In 1996, the ACLU had Lamberth examine 
the data. He drove along I-95 north of Baltimore and counted speeding cars 
to establish the percentage of law-breaking drivers who were black.

Measured against that benchmark, the Maryland numbers were staggering. At 
the JFK barracks, nearly 30 percent of drivers stopped were black, though 
Lamberth estimated that blacks accounted for only 17 percent of the 
law-breakers. And of the drivers searched, 73 percent were black.

In 1997, a federal judge found a "pattern and practice of discrimination." 
In 1998, the ACLU filed a new suit backed by testimony from 14 additional 
plaintiffs and more than 125 alleged victims of racial profiling.

No one wants the case to go to trial, and both sides are urgently looking 
for common ground.

"We would like for there to be an agreed-upon resolution to this case that 
everyone could be happy with, rather than a big court fight that places us 
as antagonists," Wilkins said.

"But I'm not going to lie about the reality," he said. "Maryland has really 
been the capital of racial profiling in the United States. The disparities 
on I-95 in Maryland match or beat anything documented [elsewhere], and 
they've been going on for years and years and years. And they continued 
even after the settlement of a lawsuit and the involvement of a federal 
judge. How much worse can you get than that?"
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