U.S. Wrote Outline for Race Profiling, New Jersey Argues

        By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI

            RENTON, 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.
 
 
 
 
 
 

        November 29, 2000

        U.S. Wrote Outline for Race Profiling, New
        Jersey Argues (continued)

        Page 2 of 2.

        "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.