Racial Profiling Routine, New Jersey Finds
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI and ROBERT HANLEY
TRENTON,
Nov. 27 — At least
8 of every 10 automobile
searches carried out by
state
troopers on the New Jersey
Turnpike over most of the
last
decade were conducted on
vehicles driven by blacks
and
Hispanics, state documents
have
revealed.
Those figures, contained
in 91,000
pages of internal state
records -- available
online at: New
Jersey archive
distributed today by the
state
attorney general's office,
showed
that a systematic process
of racial
profiling became a routine
part of
state police operations,
Attorney
General John Farmer said.
The documents released by
Mr.
Farmer were among those
being
sought by lawyers representing
minority drivers who are
suing the
state, claiming racial
discrimination.
Mr. Farmer explained that
the
practice of singling out
black and
Hispanic drivers evolved
as part
of the drug war of the mid-1980's,
when the federal Drug Enforcement
Administration began asking
local
police forces to intercept
narcotics
traffickers on major highways.
Mr. Farmer said the policy
had
some success as a crime-fighting
tool. He said 30 percent
of the
searches on the turnpike
turned up
some kind of contraband,
while 70
percent turned up nothing
improper.
But even as such race-based
tactics helped the New
Jersey State Police arrest
thousands of drug smugglers,
the agency's methods inflicted
a terrible price on the
state's minority residents,
Mr. Farmer said, as troopers
discriminated against thousands
of black and Hispanic
drivers who were stopped
and searched solely because
of their skin color.
"The effect of that kind
of ratio over 10 years is
devastating," Mr. Farmer
said. "This may have been
effective in law enforcement
terms, but as social policy
it was a disaster."
Mr. Farmer, who became attorney
general 17 months
ago, said he was releasing
the documents as a way to
"pay a debt to the past"
and try to rebuild public
confidence in the force.
But he also defended the
actions of previous attorneys
general, saying that the
law regarding profiling
was muddled, and that many of
the drug interdiction policies
that encouraged profiling
were taught by the Drug
Enforcement Administration
and the federal Department
of Transportation.
Even today, Mr. Farmer said,
case law conflicts on
when it is permissible for
an officer to consider race in
deciding to stop a driver.
He praised Gov. Christie
Whitman for making New Jersey
the first state to take
sweeping measures to stop
racial profiling.
Mr. Farmer's remarks and
the release of the documents
did little to quiet many
civil rights activists, however.
The Rev. Reginald T. Jackson,
executive director of the
New Jersey Black Ministers
Council, said the Whitman
administration ignored complaints
for years, and acted
only after three unarmed
minority men were shot by two
troopers on the turnpike
in April 1998. He called for a
change in the State Constitution
to make the attorney
general's office an elected
one. Under the state's current
constitution, adopted in
1947, the attorney general is
appointed by the governor.
"Right now the attorney general
is not going to do
anything that the person
who appointed him is opposed
to," Mr. Jackson said. "He
is not the people's lawyer;
he is the governor's lawyer.
Who do the people go to?"
And the documents are also
likely to intensify the
criticism of one of the
governor's longtime political
allies, Justice Peter G.
Verniero of the State Supreme
Court, who was attorney
general from 1996 to 1998
During public hearings before his
confirmation to the state's
high
court in 1999, Mr. Verniero
testified that he had no
detailed
knowledge of any statistical
evidence of profiling until
the
attorney general's office
conducted
its own review of the State
Police
in 1999.
But one memo from an assistant
attorney general to Mr.
Verniero,
dated July 29, 1997, included
an
audit of the Moorestown
barracks,
which had been the subject
of
repeated complaints of racial
profiling. The audit showed
that
blacks and Hispanics, who
make
up 13.5 percent of the drivers
on
the turnpike, accounted
for more
than 33 percent of the traffic
stops.
During his sworn testimony
before
the State Senate, Mr. Verniero
also
insisted that he had worked
in
cooperation with the United
States
Department of Justice, which
was
conducting a civil rights
investigation of the profiling
allegations. But a memo
from a
meeting on May 20, 1997,
at which
Mr. Verniero and his assistants
discussed their response
to the
federal investigation, also
contains
handwritten notes that indicate
that
Mr. Verniero was adamantly
opposed to entering into
a consent
decree and allowing a federal
monitor to oversee the department.
The notes, which
are believed to have been
written by an assistant
attorney general, say that
Mr. Verniero declared that
before he'd sign a consent
decree, "they'd tie me to a
train and drag me along
the track."
Mr. Verniero has declined to discuss the matter.
The documents, which fill
185 three-ring binders and
are available in 15 CD-ROM
sets to anyone willing to
pay $1,000, make up the
most complete record to date
of a problem which has,
fairly or not, come to dominate
the national reputation
of the New Jersey State Police.
The records include a vast
array of material spanning
the administrations of three
different governors and
seven attorneys general:
from state police training
manuals, major policy initiatives
and disciplinary
records to minutiae like
radio logs and thousands of
pages of individual traffic
tickets issued by troopers.
Mr. Farmer noted that in
1990 and again in 1993, the
state responded to complaints
of racially biased
enforcement by strengthening
its training for troopers
and restating its opposition
to racial profiling.
"The department acknowledged
the abuse, tried to
address it and believed
that they had," he said.
But when a Gloucester County
judge ruled in 1996 that
there was evidence of profiling
by troopers on the
southern end of the turnpike,
there was a concerted
effort to deny the problem,
the documents show. A
series of memos from 1996
and 1997 show that state
police commanders and some
members of the attorney
general's office continued
to deny the widespread
practice of racial profiling
by troopers even though they
had detailed statistical
evidence of the problem.
By 1997, for instance, the
department's own internal
audits found that in some
barracks, members of
minority groups accounted
for 80 percent or more of all
searches. The investigation
by the attorney general's
office and the Justice Department
found that such
results were common throughout
the state.
In one of the harshest assessments
of the force, Deputy
Director Debra L. Stone
of the Department of Law and
Public Safety wrote in February
1999 that
discrimination was so deeply
ingrained in state police
culture that veteran troopers
acted as "coaches" and
taught profiling tactics
to rookies.
"Trooper after trooper has
testified that coach taught
them how to profile minorities,"
Ms. Stone wrote. "The
coaches also teach this
to minority troopers."
Ms. Stone's memo said that
the troopers also went to
great lengths to cover each
other's misdeeds, and that
after the April 1998 turnpike
shooting, the troopers
brought in a drug-sniffing
dog in hopes that it might find
evidence to justify the
stop and the gunfire. No
contraband was found.
William Buckman, a lawyer
who argued the Gloucester
County case, said that he
was stunned that many of the
documents released today
were denied to lawyers who
requested them five years
ago.
"There seems to be only one
reason to withhold all of
this: to conceal from the
public how high up in the
attorney general's office
people were aware of the
length and the breadth of
the problem," Mr. Buckman
said. "And the striking
thing, even today, is that when
you read these documents,
you get no sense of urgency,
no sense of outrage that
people ware being harassed
because of their race, and
it must be stopped no matter
what."
Mrs. Whitman, who was attending
a conference in
California, issued a written
statement praising Mr.
Farmer for releasing the
documents.
"While racial profiling did
not begin in this state or
under this administration,
history will show that the end
of racial profiling in America
did indeed begin in New
Jersey and under this administration,"
she said.
The political furor surrounding
the issue is almost
certain to continue. The
State Senate Judiciary
Committee, which is investigating
the issue, plans to
take sworn statements from
a wide range of state
officials and may hold public
hearings early next year.
December 23, 1999 NYT
U.S. Will Monitor New Jersey Police on Race Profiling
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI
TRENTON,
Dec. 22 -- Citing extensive evidence
that New Jersey State Police officers have
discriminated against minority
motorists, the Justice
Department announced today
that it would appoint an
outside monitor to oversee
the police agency and to
ensure that it enacts policy
changes.
The monitor, who will report
directly to a federal
judge, will have broad powers
to inspect virtually any
function of officers and
their supervisors, but will
specifically order them
to keep records of arrests and
traffic stops by race to
make sure that minorities are not
being singled out.
The monitor will also be
charged with following
through on the Justice Department's
recommendations
that New Jersey overhaul
the Police Department's
secretive internal affairs
system, which many civil
rights advocates and former
troopers said was used to
protect abusive and bigoted
officers.
The state would face contempt
of court charges if it
failed to comply.
The outside oversight, which
was announced as part of
a legal agreement between
the Justice Department's
civil rights division and
the state, is the first time
federal officials have installed
a monitor to supervise a
police agency specifically
because of evidence that
officers were focusing on
members of minorities during
traffic stops.
Two other law enforcement
agencies, the Police
Departments in Pittsburgh
and in Steubenville, Ohio,
have also reached settlements
with the Justice
Department to resolve accusations
that their officers
engaged in misconduct.
The appointment of a monitor
was also a political
rebuke to Gov. Christine
Todd Whitman, who denied
that there was any pattern
of discrimination by troopers
until April, nearly three
years after a state judge in
Gloucester County ruled
that there was compelling
evidence of widespread use
of the practice, known as
racial profiling.
The governor did not attend
the joint news conference
with Justice Department
officials, and in a written
statement she said she was
gratified that the federal
government had endorsed
many of the same changes the
state attorney general proposed
earlier this year.
But Justice Department investigators,
who spoke only
on the condition of anonymity,
said that they found the
discrimination to be more
serious and widely accepted
by officers and supervisors
than the state attorney
general's office had acknowledged
in its report.
Bill Lann Lee, acting assistant
attorney general for civil
rights, would not characterize
the specific findings of
the Justice Department's
three-year investigation. Mr.
Lee said, however, that
the agreement with the state and
the appointment of the outside
monitor would end the
inattentive supervision,
training and disciplinary
practices that the Justice
Department said allowed
some officers to single
out black and Hispanic
motorists with impunity.
"This agreement will establish
real safeguards against
racially discriminatory
stops and searches for motorists
who drive on New Jersey
highways," Mr. Lee said.
By entering the agreement,
called a consent decree,
with New Jersey officials,
the Justice Department will
drop its threat to file
a civil lawsuit against the state for
failing to protect the rights
of minority motorists.
Under the agreement signed
today, troopers are
forbidden to use race as
a factor in traffic stops or in
decisions to conduct a search
except when they are
pursuing a specific criminal
suspect and have a
detailed description.
Troopers will also be required
to document the race,
gender and ethnicity of
all drivers who are stopped,
and state police supervisors
and the federal monitor
will review officers' activities
on a computer database.
The state police, an agency
so independent that it has
often refused to provide
information to lawmakers and
other state officials, have
also agreed to issue public
reports twice a year and
to provide a breakdown of
arrests and traffic stops
by race.
Carson J. Dunbar Jr., who
was appointed
superintendent of the 2,700-member
police force after
his predecessor, Col. Carl
A. Williams, was dismissed
for making racially insensitive
comments, said that the
new policies would provide
a road map for
supervisors trying to improve
the force.
The state attorney general,
John J. Farmer Jr., said that
the intense scrutiny from
both state officials and the
federal monitor would provide
a strong deterrent to any
officer inclined to discriminate.
The Justice Department began
to examine the
department in 1996, when
a judge in Gloucester County
found evidence of discrimination
by state troopers after
hearing that black drivers
on the New Jersey Turnpike
were five times more likely
than whites to be stopped.
The federal inquiry intensified
in April 1998, when
officers shot three unarmed
minority men during a
traffic stop on the turnpike,
and racial profiling
instantly became a dominant
political issue in New
Jersey and the most troubling
crisis of Governor
Whitman's tenure.
Steven H. Rosenbaum, who
led the Justice Department
investigation, said that
federal authorities found
"extensive problems" in
the tactics used by some
officers and their supervisors'
failure to address
discrimination complaints.
The monitor will oversee
sweeping changes in the state
police internal affairs
office, which has been long been
accused of cronyism and
cover-up. Mr. Rosenbaum
said that in other police
departments under federal
supervision, the monitors
review internal affairs cases
and can demand a reinvestigation
if the findings appear
dubious.
If the state police balk
at any of the monitor's requests,
Justice Department officials
can ask a federal judge to
find the department in contempt
of court for violating
the decree. But Mr. Lee
said that the Whitman
administration had cooperated
in the investigation and
that he hoped to use the
proposed changes as a model
for other law enforcement
agencies accused of
selective enforcement and
racial discrimination.
Civil rights leaders in New
Jersey were relieved that
the Justice Department insisted
on outside oversight.
Although Governor Whitman
dismissed the former
police superintendent in
February and has since
installed several layers
of supervision within the
attorney general's office,
many black and Hispanic
leaders feared that the
state might not follow through on
its plans to revamp the
force.
"We think the consent decree
is tough and can ensure
that the state helps to
end racial profiling and
discrimination," said the
Rev. Reginald T. Jackson,
director of the Black Ministers
Council of New Jersey.
"The facts speak for themselves.
You have a new
superintendent, a new attorney
general and a new
assistant attorney general.
But the Justice Department
recognizes that we need
someone else to watch them
because they were so slow
to respond in the first
place."
-------------------
NYT Oct 7, 2000.
Monitors Commend Police on Effort to End Profiling
By ROBERT HANLEY
The
two monitors overseeing the New Jersey State
Police Department's effort to end racial profiling
commended the force yesterday
for its first steps
toward that goal.
It was the first report card
from the independent
monitors, who were appointed
by a federal judge in
March, nearly a year after
the state admitted that
troopers had singled out
minority drivers for traffic
stops.
As part of an agreement with
the federal Justice
Department to stop the practice,
the state is required to
make 97 specific changes
in policies, rules for traffic
stops, the training and
supervision of troopers and the
handling of misconduct charges.
In their report yesterday,
the monitors said that state
police officials had written
new rules and regulations
to effect 83 of those changes.
But the department has
been slower in putting the
new rules to work in
day-to-day operations, the
report said. The monitors
said that they had finished
analyzing the use of 56
changes and found that the
department was practicing
23 of them.
Nonetheless, the report said,
the department was not
resisting change. "While
the agency is not in complete
compliance, this is to be
expected," said the monitors,
James Ginger, a consultant
from San Antonio, and
Alberto Rivas, a lawyer
from Newark.
Rules for nine other required
changes had not been
prepared yet, and the department's
progress in drafting
the remaining five had not
been analyzed, the report
said.
The monitors praised state
police executives for the
"commitment, focus, energy
and professionalism" they
had exhibited in starting
work on the changes. If that
positive attitude persists,
the remaining tasks should be
completed swiftly, the monitors
said.
"Rather than adopting the
`quick fix,' " the report said,
"the agency appears intent
on adopting the best
available process, technology
and system to conform to
both the letter and spirit
of the decree."
The state entered into the
agreement, or consent decree,
after the Justice Department
conducted a three-year
investigation of racial
profiling and threatened to file
suit against the state for
failing to protect the rights of
minority drivers.
Justice Department officials
said at the time that the
consent decree and outside
monitoring of it would end
the inattentive supervision,
training and disciplinary
practices that, they said,
had allowed some troopers to
single out black and Hispanic
drivers with impunity.
Some provisions of the consent
decree specifically
prohibit troopers from stopping
a driver based on his
race, national origin or
ethnicity, unless the troopers
have reasonable suspicion
that the driver fits the
description of a suspect
being sought.
The report said the rules
detailing this prohibition had
been drafted, but the monitors
said they had not yet
checked whether troopers
on patrol were complying.
The report was submitted
to Judge Mary L. Cooper of
United States District Court
in Trenton, who is
ultimately responsible for
ensuring that the state police
comply with the consent
decree. It is the first of four
reports that Dr. Ginger
and Mr. Rivas must submit in
the next year; after that,
they are required to submit two
a year. The monitoring is
expected to last up to five
years.
Attorney General John J.
Farmer Jr. said he was
pleased with the pace of
reforms. "Much remains to be
done," he said, "but I believe
this report is strong
evidence of New Jersey's
commitment to restoring the
public's faith and confidence
in the state police."
"I think the minority community
— I think all of New
Jersey — should be tremendously
heartened by this
report," he added.
Many of the required changes
that have not yet been
made, or that have not yet
been checked, involve major
revisions in training programs
and supervision of
troopers on patrol.
Although the consent decree
set a 180-day deadline for
adoption of new rules and
procedures, the monitors
said that the timetable
was unrealistic. They said it
would take 12 to 18 months
to completely revamp
policies and retrain all
2,700 troopers.
Similarly, they said, it
would take that much time to
install a new computer system
at state police
headquarters. The system
is to allow supervisors to
carefully monitor the patrol
activities of all troopers
and keep centralized, up-to-the-minute
records of
arrests and stops.
------------
April 24, 2001
New Jersey Turnpike Data Show
Decline in Searches
By IVER PETERSON
TRENTON, April 23 —
State
troopers along the southern
segment of the New Jersey
Turnpike have nearly stopped
making the kind of highway
vehicle searches that are the focus
of charges of racial profiling,
according to figures compiled by
the state police.
Statistics for the turnpike as a
whole show a sharp drop in
searches, to 281 in 2000 from 440
in 1999. The falloff seems to be
accelerating this year.
Officials with the state police and
the state troopers' union differ
over whether the drop indicates
better police procedures or a force that has been intimidated by
the furor over racial profiling. But the figures are the first
indication that the continuing debate over racial profiling and
police conduct could be having a serious impact on police
procedures.
According to figures released by Col. Carson J. Dunbar Jr., the
state police superintendent, state troopers at the Moorestown
station made 163 consent searches in 1999 and 150 last year,
but only 8 in the first three months of this year. Colonel Dunbar
attributed the drop to both the uproar over racial profiling and
to changes in the training and supervision at the station.
Consent searches are those in which officers, acting on hunches
rather than concrete evidence, are able to get the driver's
consent.
Members of minorities remain far more likely to be the subject
of a consent search, however, despite the decline in numbers.
Of the 440 vehicles searched along the turnpike in 1999, 211
were driven by blacks, 119 by whites, 109 by Hispanics and 1
by an Asian. Last year, the breakdown of consent searches for
the whole turnpike was 123 black, 83 white, 70 Hispanic, 3
East Indian and 2 Asian.
The Moorestown station, covering the turnpike south of Exit 7,
has long had a swashbuckling reputation for its aggressive
efforts to interdict drug trafficking. Its troopers' actions led to
the first lawsuit against the state charging racial profiling, and
were the focus of the federal civil rights investigation into the
state police. That investigation resulted in an agreement by the
state to crack down on the singling out of minority motorists for
stops and searches.
"Quite frankly, I think some of this is a result of the attention, the
scrutiny," Colonel Dunbar said. "But what I feel is important is
that whatever we do involving searches, we do them
appropriately. The key is squeezing out anything that is not
appropriate."
But Ed Lennon, president of the State Troopers Fraternal
Association, attributed the drop in searches to plain fear.
"What I am hearing is that the troopers don't want to put their
necks on the line right now," Mr. Lennon said.
In a groundbreaking police-profiling lawsuit in 1996 and
hearings by the State Senate Judiciary Committee over two
months this year, vehicle searches involving the motorists'
consent emerged as a key indicator of racial profiling, because
such searches stem only from a trooper's hunch about something
as subjective as a driver's nervousness. They are therefore
different from probable- cause searches under United States
Supreme Court guidelines.
Probable-cause searches must be based on actual evidence —
the smell of drugs, the butt of a gun sticking out from under a
seat — and therefore require no consent.
"Consent searches tell you what the officer is doing with his
purely discretionary powers at the side of the road," said
William Buckman, a Moorestown defense lawyer who
successfully used a charge of profiling to quash evidence seized
by troopers in the 1996 case. "They tell you that he is elongating
the stop for some reason, they tell you that he has not developed
probable cause but is nevertheless intent on searching the
vehicle."
Consent search data for troopers covering the rest of the
turnpike was available only for January and February of this
year. Troopers at the turnpike's two other barracks, at Cranbury
and Newark, were never as aggressive as those at Moorestown,
but their numbers also show a steady decline.
Troopers from the Cranbury barracks, who cover the turnpike
from Exit 8 to Exit 13, made 96 such searches last year
compared with 144 consent searches in 1999. Those at the
Newark barracks, covering the turnpike north of Exit 13,
reported that the number of searches dropped to 36 last year,
from 133 in 1999.
Police analysts do not consider two months long enough to draw
conclusions about trends. But the figures show that Cranbury
reported 13 consent searches for January and February,
involving six Hispanics, four whites and three blacks. The
Newark barracks reported just four, involving three white
motorists and one black motorist.
Mr. Buckman said the steep drop in searches at Moorestown for
the first quarter of the year seemed to be good news.
"If you are representing to me that consent searches in
Moorestown have dropped to close to nothing, then that would
certainly be a significant indicator that one measure of racial
profiling is down," he said. He added, however, that the drop in
consent searches may not tell the whole story. "I would have to
be convinced that officers haven't changed what used to be a
consent search into probable-cause searches."
Indeed, consent search statistics are only one out of several
kinds of data from police interaction with motorists, including
total number of stops, summonses issued, probable- cause
searches and warnings.
The State Department of Law and Public Safety is in the final
stages of creating a reporting system to collect the details of all
traffic stops by the state police. Figures on total traffic stops,
the broadest measure of police activity, will not be made
available until June.