Racial Study of Speeders Is Released in New Jersey
By IVER PETERSON
TRENTON,
March 26 — New Jersey released a long-withheld and hotly disputed study
of turnpike speeders
today that suggests blacks may be
more likely than others to break the speed limit, along with correspondence
from the federal Department of Justice challenging the
report's conclusions.
The study involved matching photographs of nearly 39,000
drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike last spring with
radar-gun readings of their speed. Evaluators then determined
the race of drivers from the photographs. The study
was undertaken as part of the state's response to evidence
that state troopers used racial profiling on the turnpike.
Because the report concluded that blacks tended to speed
more than whites on certain parts of the turnpike, state
police union leaders demanded that the state release
it, saying its conclusions would absolve the police from the
charges of profiling.
The state, however, had withheld the report in January
when the Department of Justice raised objections to its
methodology. But the findings were reported a week ago
in The New York Times.
Today, the office of Attorney General David Samson took
pains to point out that the report had been ordered by the
previous administration. In a statement, Mr. Samson did
not say why the state was releasing the report, but noted
that it did nothing to reduce the state's admission that
racial profiling by state troopers was widespread.
"We are long past the time when New Jersey admitted racial
profiling was a reality on the turnpike," Mr. Samson
said.
New Jersey has entered into a consent decree with the
Justice Department to wipe out profiling by troopers, and Mr.
Samson noted that the study released today was not part
of that agreement. Instead, it was intended to offer more
scientific support for evidence that the police were
singling out minority drivers for traffic stops, by using high-speed
photography to identify the race of drivers.
The study used specially designed radar-gun cameras in
a variety of locations on the turnpike. It defined speeding as
exceeding the speed limit by 15 miles per hour, since
officers are instructed to focus on the worst offenders.
Researchers then showed the photographs of 38,747 drivers
to teams of three evaluators who tried to determine
each driver's race, without knowing whether the driver
had been speeding. At least two evaluators were able to agree
on the race of 26,334 of the drivers, and an analysis
of those drivers found that the disparity between white and
black drivers widened at higher speeds.
In the southern segment of the turnpike, where the speed
limit is 65 miles per hour, 2.7 percent of black drivers
identified were speeders, compared with 1.4 percent of
white drivers. Among drivers going faster than 90, the
disparity was even greater.
The data was embraced quickly by police union leaders,
who argued that one reason black drivers are stopped more
often than whites is that they are more likely to speed.
The state tried to meet federal objections to the planned
January release of the report by reworking the data to get a
higher degree of certainty about the race of each driver.
But Mark A. Posner, a lawyer in the department's civil
rights division, wrote to the state that "we continue
to believe that the survey results have not been shown to be valid
or reliable."
Posted on Wed, Mar. 27, 2002 - Philadelphia Inquirer
Report ties race, speeding
The study says black drivers speed far more. The
Justice Department questioned its methods.
By Lori Hinnant Associated Press
TRENTON - A New Jersey study that suggests black
drivers speed more than other drivers was released yesterday by the state
Attorney General's Office.
Last week, New Jersey officials refused to release
the report, despite an earlier plan to make it public in January.
The study of motorists on the New Jersey Turnpike
found black drivers sped much more than other drivers and the racial gap
was wider than officials had expected. The gap widened at higher
speed limits, but there was little difference in 55 m.p.h. zones, the study
also found. Justice Department officials questioned the methods used
to gather the data.
"We continue to believe that the survey results
have not been shown to be valid or reliable," Mark A. Posner, a Justice
Department attorney, wrote in a Jan. 8 letter to the state Attorney
General's Office.
Posner asked New Jersey officials to remove any reference to the Justice Department's review of a draft of the report in the event of its release. "Those references could be read as indicating that, to the extent the department had concerns about the survey, those concerns have been answered, which is not accurate," Posner wrote.
A spokeswoman with the Justice Department did not immediately return a telephone message seeking comment last night. The federal government asked for the study as part of its probe into allegations of racial profiling. Specially designed radar gun cameras were used last spring to photograph tens of thousands of drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike. The photos were shown to teams of three evaluators who tried to determine each driver's race without knowing whether they were speeding.
James Lange, the study's lead author, has stood
by the methodology and said most concerns about the report are unfounded.
Others, he said, were addressed in later versions.
"It's a piece of the puzzle of how the troopers
are acting," Lange said. "There are certainly a lot of other pieces that
this study is completely silent on, but it does provide a bit of
useful information."
William Buckman, a lawyer for dozens of minority
motorists who have filed lawsuits contending that they were targeted by
police, said the release of the study only confirms the fears of
the Justice Department. He questioned the study's release and the fact
that it fails to address other causes for traffic stops.
"After all that has happened and after all the
water that has gone under the dam, were they still trying to prove that
racial profiling doesn't exist?" Buckman asked. "One really has to
question their judgment."
A 1998 shooting of four minority men by state troopers on the turnpike inflamed accusations that state police targeted minority motorists for searches. A year after the shooting, state officials admitted troopers practiced racial profiling. The state then entered into a court agreement to prevent a lawsuit by the Justice Department. One part of the agreement required the monitoring of the race of motorists stopped by troopers. Earlier studies found little difference between white and minority motorists for speeding, Buckman said.
State and federal data show minorities are more
likely than whites to be stopped for traffic violations and to be asked
to consent to searches. The state troopers' union demanded last week
that the new study be made public and contended that it absolves them of
charges they practiced racial profiling. A telephone message seeking
comment from the troopers' union was not immediately returned last night.
Buckman said the troopers' reaction shows the State Police has a long way
to go in ending racial profiling, which former Attorney General Peter G.
Verniero and State Police leadership agreed was "real, not imagined."
"They seize upon it to say, 'See, it vindicates
us,' " Buckman said. "This report really answers nothing and is probably
not worth the paper that it's written on."
State Attorney General David Samson said the release
of the report would allow for a public evaluation of its results. The Justice
Department has commissioned its own study of the report's reliability,
Samson said.
"We are long past the time when New Jersey admitted
racial profiling was a reality on the turnpike," Samson said. "The report
was not required by the consent decree, nor does it change the course
we are set upon. It does not alter the past or undermine the evidence that
profiling was real."
Posted on Mon, Mar. 25, 2002 - Philadelphia Inquirer
Study
linking speeding, race is traveling the wrong road
By Lloyd Williams
Is speeding genetic? That's what the ever-profiling
N.J. State Police would have us believe, citing uncirculated statistics
few people
have set eyes on. The New Jersey State Troopers
are pressing for release of a confidential study commissioned (and now
withheld) by the state government. The laughable
claim is that the study proves that blacks, Latinos and other minorities
speed
much more often than white drivers.
It would be comical, except that the troopers are
now using the report to rationalize past racial profiling. The unreleased
research
was carried out by an outfit called the Public
Services Research Institute (PSRI), the same consulting firm that had compiled
evidence only a year ago that proved racial profiling
persisted on the New Jersey Turnpike. In the present case, no results have
been announced. Nevertheless, the troopers are
claiming vindication - by a report nobody has had a chance to question
as to its
methodologies, inferences or conclusions.
The state attorney general's office, which paid
$500,000 for the research, chose not to release it because a glitch in
the
methodology rendered the racial identifications
of the drivers unreliable. Now that's a serious problem when you're planning
to
offer an opinion linking race and speeding. Apparently,
PSRI's "scientific" determination of race relied on the consensus of three
evaluators assigned to eyeball a photo of each
subject. About a third of the photos were tossed out because the experts
couldn't
even agree on who was black, who was white and
who was other. What does that tell you?
It tells me that those who conducted the study
weren't really qualified to conduct a study involving color and behavior.
To be
sure, race means a lot to us in the United States
- but racial classifications here have served as political and social fault
lines more
than anything else. They certainly are less and
less scientific: The closer science looks at race, the less such classifications
mean.
The Human Genome Project, that honorable and truly
scientific endeavor, has devoted billions to mapping the genetic blueprint
of
our species. And the project has yet to discover
significant genetic demarcators of one race from another. Not that racial
differences don't exist, but that the concept
of race as an utter separator just doesn't hold. Well over 99 percent of
the genetic
code mapped on the chromosomes of all humans is
identical.
This conclusion ought to be dispositive and of
tremendous significance: It refutes all the long-standing myths that allow
for
arbitrary racial groupings.
The question becomes this: Since science suggests
there probably is little biological basis for linking race and speeding,
what
might we conclude about anyone who plays to deep-seated
prejudices in relying on a very questionable study that tries to do just
that, a study sure to resurrect specious, outmoded
stereotypes? Any justification of its prejudiced conclusions relies on
the
ludicrous idea that blacks drive like one another,
whites like one another, and Latinos like one another.
Police would be laughed out of court were they
to resort to such a measure to project how people sharing, say, eye color
or hair
color operated their automobiles. I don't buy
the idea that pigmentation disposes to behavior. I hope you don't, either.
Whatever
happened to free will? And even if the study in
question rendered an accurate reading of the choices made by the individuals
observed, what basis would that really give to
extrapolate to the conduct of millions of other individuals, who share
- what?
color? Are we really supposed to see the driving
habits of a small number of like-hued people as indicating how similar-looking
people are likely to act behind the wheel?
Ah, but one does feel a certain eagerness abroad
to embrace the comic illogic of a report apparently too embarrassing to
release.
Lloyd Williams, a lawyer, is a member of the bar in several states.
------------
Heather McDonald
The
Racial Profiling Myth Debunked
New
data show City Journal was right—there’s no
credible evidence that racial profiling exists.
27
Mar 2002
The anti–racial profiling juggernaut has finally met its nemesis: the truth. According to a new study, black drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike are twice as likely to speed as white drivers, and are even more dominant among drivers breaking 90 miles per hour. This finding demolishes the myth of racial profiling. Precisely for that reason, the Bush Justice Department tried to bury the report so the profiling juggernaut could continue its destructive campaign against law enforcement. What
|
Until now, the anti-police crusade that travels under the banner of “ending racial profiling” has traded on ignorance. Its spokesmen went around the country charging that the police were stopping “too many” minorities for traffic infractions or more serious violations. The reason, explained the anti-cop crowd, was that the police were racist.
They can argue that no more. The new turnpike study, commissioned by the New Jersey attorney general, solves one of the most vexing problems in racial profiling analysis: establishing a violator benchmark. To show that the police are stopping “too many” members of a group, you need to know, at a minimum, the rate of lawbreaking among that group—the so-called violator benchmark. Only if the rate of stops or arrests greatly exceeds the rate of criminal behavior should our suspicions be raised (see “The Myth of Racial Profiling,” Spring 2001). But most of the studies that the ACLU and defense attorneys have proffered to show biased behavior by the police only used crude population measures as the benchmark for comparing police activity—arguing, say, that if 24 percent of speeding stops on a particular stretch of highway were of black drivers, in a city or state where blacks make up 19 percent of the population, the police are over-stopping blacks.
Such an analysis is clearly specious, since it fails to say what percentage of speeders are black, but the data required to rebut it were not available. Matthew Zingraff, a criminologist at North Carolina State University, explains why: “Everybody was terrified. Good statisticians were throwing up their hands and saying, ‘This is one battle you’ll never win. I don’t want to be called a racist.’” Even to suggest studying the driving behavior of different racial groups was to demonstrate one’s bigotry, as Zingraff himself discovered when he proposed such research in North Carolina and promptly came under attack. Such investigations violate the reigning fiction in anti-racial profiling rhetoric: that all groups commit crime and other infractions at equal rates. It follows from this central fiction that any differences in the rate at which the police interact with certain citizens result only from police bias, not from differences in citizen behavior.
Despite the glaring flaws in every racial profiling study heretofore available, the press and the politicians jumped on the anti-profiling bandwagon. How could they lose? They showed their racial sensitivity, and, as for defaming the police without evidence, well, you don’t have to worry that the New York Times will be on your case if you do.
No institution made more destructive use of racial profiling junk science than the Clinton Justice Department. Armed with the shoddy studies, it slapped costly consent decrees on police departments across the country, requiring them to monitor their officers’ every interaction with minorities, among other managerial intrusions.
No consent decree was more precious to the anti-police agenda than the one slapped on New Jersey. In 1999, then-governor Christine Todd Whitman had declared her state’s highway troopers guilty of racial profiling, based on a study of consent searches that would earn an F in a freshmen statistics class. (In a highway consent search, an officer asks a driver for permission to search his car, usually for drugs or weapons.) The study, executed by the New Jersey attorney general, lacked crucial swathes of data on stops, searches, and arrests, and compensated for the lack by mixing data from wildly different time periods. Most fatally, the attorney general’s study lacked any benchmark of the rate at which different racial groups transport illegal drugs on the turnpike. Its conclusion that the New Jersey state troopers were searching “too many” blacks for drugs was therefore meaningless.
Hey, no problem! exclaimed the Clinton Justice Department. Here’s your consent decree and high-priced federal monitor; we’ll expect a lengthy report every three months on your progress in combating your officers’ bigotry.
Universally decried as racists, New Jersey’s troopers started shunning discretionary law-enforcement activity. Consent searches on the turnpike, which totaled 440 in 1999, the year that the anti–racial profiling campaign got in full swing, dropped to an astoundingly low 11 in the six months that ended October 31, 2001. At the height of the drug war in 1988, the troopers filed 7,400 drug charges from the turnpike, most of those from consent searches; in 2000, they filed 370 drug charges, a number that doubtless has been steadily dropping since then. It is unlikely that drug trafficking has dropped on New Jersey’s main highway by anything like these percentages.
“There’s a tremendous demoralizing effect of being guilty until proven innocent,” explains trooper union vice president Dave Jones. “Anyone you interact with can claim you’ve made a race-based stop, and you spend years defending yourself.” Arrests by state troopers have also been plummeting since the Whitman–Justice Department racial profiling declaration. Not surprisingly, murder jumped 65 percent in Newark, a major destination of drug traffickers, between 2000 and 2001. In an eerie replay of the eighties’ drug battles, Camden is considering inviting the state police back to fight its homicidal drug gangs.
But one thing did not change after the much-publicized consent decree: the proportion of blacks stopped on the turnpike for speeding continued to exceed their proportion in the driving population. Man, those troopers must be either really dumb or really racist! thought most observers, including the New Jersey attorney general, who accused the troopers of persistent profiling.
Faced with constant calumny for their stop rates, the New Jersey troopers asked the attorney general to do the unthinkable: study speeding behavior on the turnpike. If it turned out that all groups drive the same, as the reigning racial profiling myths hold, then the troopers would accept the consequences.
Well, we now know that the troopers were neither dumb nor racist; they were merely doing their jobs. According to the study commissioned by the New Jersey attorney general and leaked first to the New York Times and then to the Web, blacks make up 16 percent of the drivers on the turnpike, and 25 percent of the speeders in the 65-mile-per-hour zones, where profiling complaints are most common. (The study counted only those going more than 15 miles per hour over the speed limit as speeders.) Black drivers speed twice as much as white drivers, and speed at reckless levels even more. Blacks are actually stopped less than their speeding behavior would predict—they are 23 percent of those stopped.
The devastation wrought by this study to the anti-police agenda is catastrophic. The medieval Vatican could not have been more threatened had Galileo offered photographic proof of the solar system. It turns out that the police stop blacks more for speeding because they speed more. Race has nothing to do with it.
This is not a politically acceptable result. And the researchers who conducted the study knew it. Anticipating a huge backlash should they go public with their findings, they checked and rechecked their data. But the results always came out the same.
Being scientists, not politicians, they prepared to publish their study this past January, come what may. Not so fast! commanded the now-Bush Justice Department. We have a few questions for you. And the Bush DOJ, manned by the same attorneys who had so eagerly snapped up the laughable New Jersey racial profiling report in 1999, proceeded to pelt the speeding researchers with a series of increasingly desperate objections.
The elegant study, designed by the Public Service Research Institute in Maryland, had taken photos with high-speed camera equipment and a radar gun of nearly 40,000 drivers on the turnpike. The researchers then showed the photos to a team of three evaluators, who identified the race of the driver. The evaluators had no idea if the drivers in the photos had been speeding. The photos were then correlated with speeds.
The driver identifications are not reliable! whined the Justice Department. The researchers had established a driver’s race by agreement among two of the three evaluators. So in response to DOJ’s complaint, the researchers reran their analysis, using only photos about which the evaluators had reached unanimous agreement. The speeding ratios came out identically to before.
The data are incomplete! shouted the Justice Department next. About one third of the photos had been unreadable, because of windshield glare that interfered with the camera, or the driver’s position. Aha! said the federal attorneys. Those unused photos would change your results! But that is a strained argument. The only way that the 12,000 or so unreadable photos would change the study’s results would be if windshield glare or a seating position that obstructed the camera disproportionately affected one racial group. Clearly, they do not.
Nevertheless, DOJ tried to block the release of the report until its objections were answered. “Based on the questions we have identified, it may well be that the results reported in the draft report are wrong or unreliable,” portentously wrote Mark Posner, a Justice lawyer held over from the Clinton era.
DOJ’s newfound zeal for pseudo-scientific nitpicking is remarkable, given its laissez-faire attitude toward earlier slovenly reports that purported to show racial profiling. Where it gets its new social-science expertise is also a mystery, since according to North Carolina criminologist Matthew Zingraff, “there’s not a DOJ attorney who knows a thing about statistical methods and analysis.” Equally surprising is Justice’s sudden unhappiness with the Public Service Research Institute, since it approved the selection of the institute for an earlier demographic study of the turnpike.
The institute proposed a solution to the impasse: Let us submit the study to a peer-reviewed journal or a neutral body like the National Academy of Sciences. If a panel of our scientific peers determines the research to be sound, release the study then. No go, said the Justice Department. That study ain’t seeing the light of day.
Robert Voas, the study’s co-author, is amazed by Justice’s intransigence. “I think it’s very unfortunate that the politics have gotten in the way of science,” he says, choosing his words carefully. “The scientific system has not been allowed to move as it should have in this situation.”
As DOJ and the New Jersey attorney general stalled, The Record of Bergen posted the report on the Web, forcing the state attorney general to release it officially. Now the damage control begins in earnest. Everyone with a stake in the racial profiling myth, from the state attorney general to the ACLU to defense attorneys who have been getting drug dealers out of jail and back on the streets by charging police racism, is trying to minimize the significance of the findings. But they are fighting a rear-guard battle. Waiting in the wings are other racial profiling studies by statisticians who actually understand the benchmark problem: Matthew Zingraff’s pioneering traffic research in North Carolina, due out in April, as well as sound studies in Pennsylvania, New York, and Miami. Expect many of the results to support the turnpike data, since circumstantial evidence from traffic fatalities and drunk-driving tests have long suggested different driving behaviors among different racial groups. While racist cops undoubtedly do exist, and undoubtedly they are responsible for isolated instances of racial profiling, the evidence shows that systematic racial profiling by police does not exist.
The
Bush administration, however desperate to earn racial sensitivity points,
should realize that far more than politics is at stake in the poisonous
anti–racial profiling agenda. It has strained police-community relations
and made it more difficult for the police to protect law-abiding citizens
in inner-city neighborhoods. The sooner the truth about policing gets out,
the more lives will be saved, and the more communities will be allowed
to flourish freed from the yoke of crime.