'RACIAL PROFILING' IS BAD POLICING

Are America's cops on the verge of crisis? A cascade of revelations this year has further eroded many Americans' confidence that the nation's law-enforcement agencies function free of racial bias. But while police brutality makes most of the headlines, mainstream black Americans find themselves more intimately identifying with stories of a more common form of official bias: the use of race to "profile" suspects.

In April, New Jersey Attorney General Peter Verniero released a report finding that state troopers routinely used the race of drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike to decide whom to stop and search. Gov. Christine Todd Whitman declared that New Jersey had been "infected by [a] national problem." But rather than provoking surprise and outrage among blacks, the report elicited a familiar anger and frustration. Many black Americans have long swapped stories of confrontations with traffic-patrol officers, apparently precipitated by little more than a policeman's stereotypes about the types of cars and neighborhoods in which black citizens should be found. The phenomenon has a colloquial label--"DWB," or driving while black.

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