Verdict for Former Deputy Divides an Oregon County

          By SAM HOWE VERHOVEK

              CLACKAMAS, Ore., Feb.
               23 — The way Carl Bell
          told it to a federal jury, racial jokes
          — and "bizarre forms" of racial
          profiling — were common at the
          Clackamas County Sheriff's
          Department.

          Russian immigrants in the area
          were likely to be car thieves, Mr.
          Bell said one sheriff's deputy told
          him. Another deputy told him to
          watch out for groups of Asians in
          certain Japanese-made
          automobiles, for they were likely
          to be gang members, said Mr.
          Bell, who went to work in 1998 as
          the only black officer on a
          100-member force of patrol
          deputies.

          But the way Sheriff Pat Detloff and
          seven deputies told it to the jury,
          Mr. Bell was the one offering bizarre characterizations. There was no
          racial profiling in Clackamas County, they all testified, and several said
          Mr. Bell started making such complaints only after it became clear he
          was failing the training program and was on his way to being fired.

          In a verdict that stunned the department in this suburban Portland county
          and prompted it to vow a vigorous appeal, the jurors essentially sided
          with Mr. Bell, who had sued the county over his firing.

          The jurors unanimously ordered the county to pay $850,000 in damages
          to Mr. Bell for his 1998 firing, and then took the highly unusual step of
          finding Sheriff Detloff and all the deputies who testified personally liable
          for the dismissal. The jurors said the officers had all violated his civil
          rights; they told Mr. Detloff to pay $250,000 to Mr. Bell, and the
          deputies to each pay him $52,446, the jury's calculation of his lost
          wages.

          And, some jurors said, behind the damages was a strong message.

          "Here this man speaks up about racial discrimination that's going on, and
          no one in the department does anything about it," said the foreman,
          Russell Englert, a Portland caterer. "And you know what? When you
          respond like that, when you don't do anything, you're guilty. You're
          engaging in discrimination yourself. We thought there was a lot of denial
          going on."

          Here in this county that stretches south from Portland and east toward
          Mount Hood, in an area that is overwhelmingly white but where people
          nonetheless overwhelmingly seem to describe their communities as
          racially tolerant and sensitive, a struggle is going on to make sense of the
          Feb. 2 verdict.

          Some, including many elected officials, have supported the sheriff's office,
          which said that Mr. Bell's complaints were simply not true and not
          buttressed at trial by anything other than his own testimony. Others are
          calling for investigations and housecleaning at the sheriff's office, which
          Mr. Detloff took command of just last month after serving for seven
          years as chief deputy.

          And on both sides of the case, there is frustration over one central aspect
          of the matter: no one has proven whether racial profiling does indeed go
          on in Clackamas County.

          That is because the county has not kept statistics on the ethnic
          backgrounds of people detained by its law enforcement authorities. "We
          don't do that yet, but we're heading in that direction," said Deputy Angela
          Blanchard, a spokeswoman for the sheriff's department. "We're
          developing the software to do it." Both sides said statistics, if they
          existed, would back up their case.

          But because there were none, the jury did not directly examine the
          question of whether the comments Mr. Bell attributed to fellow deputies
          in his testimony ever translated into a pattern of detentions by race. Still,
          said David Fidanque, the executive director of the Oregon branch of the
          American Civil Liberties Union, several cities and counties in Oregon
          have adopted programs to check for patterns of racial profiling, and the
          jury may have effectively punished Clackamas County for not doing so.

          "There is every indication that people find any prospect of racial profiling
          unacceptable, and I think this verdict is one indication of that," Mr.
          Fidanque said. "If Clackamas County had taken steps to recognize the
          issue and deal with it before this case happened, then I think the jury
          would have been far more sympathetic to them. But they just got a denial
          that there was any problem at all, and that probably made the jury come
          down on them harder."

          Mr. Bell said he was told to engage in various forms of racial profiling,
          and in a general way to treat blacks, Hispanics and Asians as more
          suspicious than whites. And he said he faced retaliation when he spoke
          up to superiors.

          "I complained to them about it, and I got fired," Mr. Bell, who is 37, said
          in a telephone interview from Orlando, Fla., where he is studying to go to
          law school and working as a security guard.

          Some jurors said they did not believe that the failing marks Mr. Bell
          started receiving in 1998, a few months into his employment with the
          county and shortly after he started complaining, could have been justified.
          He had received an honorable discharge after four and a half years as a
          sergeant in the Army's military police, they pointed out, and he had easily
          passed a similar training program as a police officer in Lake Oswego,
          Ore., a Portland suburb.

          Mr. Bell received several "not responding to training" marks in his grades
          after he began complaining about racial profiling and his treatment by
          other deputies. Before, his marks were mostly in the middle range of a
          1-to-7 scale, according to records presented at the trial. Since his
          departure, the county remains without any black patrol deputy.

          The jury, composed of eight white members and one black member,
          deliberated for three days after three weeks of testimony. Sheriff Detloff
          described himself just afterward as very upset by the verdict, but said he
          could not speak in detail while the case was being appealed. He and the
          deputies involved referred all calls to a Portland lawyer, John R. Osburn,
          who was hired by the county to represent them. In a telephone interview,
          Mr. Osburn said he would have no comment beyond a brief he filed in
          court this week.

          In that brief, Mr. Osburn asked Judge John Jelderks of United States
          District Court to set aside the verdict or reduce the damage award, a
          total of about $1.4 million. "The jury was not persuaded by the weight of
          the evidence," Mr. Osburn wrote in his brief; jurors, he said, "were
          improperly swayed by an emotional reaction" in favor of Mr. Bell.