Pubdate: Thu, 12 Oct 2000
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2000 The New York Times Company
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Authors: David Barstow and David Kocieniewski

RECORDS SHOW NEW JERSEY POLICE KNEW OF RACIAL PROFILING IN '96

Until 1999, the New Jersey State Police flatly denied that troopers engaged
in racial profiling. But as early as 1996, the agency's own internal audits
had turned up evidence of widespread profiling along the New Jersey
Turnpike, newly released police records show.

Despite that evidence, senior commanders rejected aggressive steps to end
the problem, the documents show, and instead pursued a strategy of
withholding information from federal civil rights prosecutors.

The apparent abuses revealed by the audits were so glaring that the chief of
internal affairs for the State Police recommended creating a formal "racial
monitoring program" that would have subjected troopers who stopped high
numbers of minority drivers to counseling and discipline. But the
superintendent of the State Police rejected the idea.

"No!" the superintendent, Col. Carl A. Williams, wrote on an October 1996
memorandum proposing the monitoring program. Two months later, confronted by
a United States Department of Justice inquiry, he and his staff began a
campaign of damage control, the documents show.

"We have consistently attempted to limit what we will be giving the
Department of Justice," Sgt. Thomas Gilbert, a central adviser to Colonel
Williams on racial profiling issues, wrote in a memorandum that portrayed
the federal inquiry as a witch hunt "obviously intended to make us look
bad." According to one document, the strategy to limit the release of
information was discussed by Gov. Christine Todd Whitman's attorney general
at the time, Peter G. Verniero, who has since been appointed to the New
Jersey Supreme Court.

Later this month, the state of New Jersey is expected to make public 50,000
pages of State Police records related to racial profiling. But many of those
records have already been turned over to lawyers suing the State Police,
including about 11,000 pages recently obtained by The New York Times and ABC
News as part of a joint reporting project. This collection of audits, radio
and patrol logs, training materials and internal correspondence offers the
first detailed look at how the New Jersey State Police responded to
persistent allegations that its troopers were stopping people based on skin
color and ethnicity.

Taken as a whole, the records show a State Police force that confronted a
serious problem, measured its deepening severity and then repeatedly failed
to take firm action to stop it. Instead, senior officers expressed concern
for the image of the State Police and apprehension about how police unions
would react to potential corrective measures. They were quick to brush aside
complaints of racial profiling from minority troopers, and they frequently
worried that heightened scrutiny would dampen enthusiasm for their highest
enforcement priority: intercepting drugs on highway smuggling routes.

Colonel Williams, fired by Governor Whitman in 1999, did not respond to
repeated telephone messages left at his home and with his lawyer seeking
comment. An aide said that Mr. Verniero would not comment.

A complete assessment of the actions of Colonel Williams and Mr. Verniero
may not be possible until more State Police records are released. The 11,000
pages released so far do not include, for example, memorandums to or from
either Governor Whitman or Mr. Verniero, who, as attorney general,
supervised the State Police. Those documents may be among the thousands of
profiling records that state lawyers have claimed are exempt from
disclosure.

But the absence is notable because racial profiling was an explosive
political issue, and New Jersey's governors have traditionally exercised
tight control over the state bureaucracy, including the State Police.

Peter McDonough, a spokesman for Mrs. Whitman, said yesterday that the
governor had cooperated fully with the Justice Department inquiry into the
State Police. Furthermore, he said, the governor was not aware of any
evidence of racial profiling until early 1999, when she learned the results
of a review that she herself had ordered.

"What the State Police knew and when they knew it I can't speak to," he
said. "I don't have any knowledge of it. I do know what the governor knew."

William H. Buckman, one of the lawyers suing the State Police, contended
yesterday that Colonel Williams's emphatic "No!" in 1996 was a missed
opportunity that ended up haunting the State Police on April 23, 1998. That
was the day two white troopers fired 11 shots at a van they had stopped on
the New Jersey Turnpike, wounding three of the four unarmed black and
Hispanic occupants and setting off a national furor over racial profiling.
Lawyers for the troopers, who are charged with attempted murder, say they
fired in self-defense when the van began backing toward them.

Had Colonel Williams embraced comprehensive racial monitoring in 1996, Mr.
Buckman said, a red flag probably would have gone up with both troopers. Of
the 70 people they arrested in 1998, the records show, 56 were black. "A
different choice might have spared not just those kids in the van, but
thousands of innocent drivers who suffered the indignity and humiliation of
being stopped because of the color of their skin," Mr. Buckman said.

A year after the shooting, Mr. Verniero reversed years of denials by state
leaders and announced that a review team from his office had concluded that
racial profiling "is real, not imagined."

In tough questioning before the State Senate, Mr. Verniero said that the
potential existence of profiling "crystallized" in his mind only after the
1998 van shooting prompted his office to examine turnpike stops, searches
and arrests.

Yet according to the records, senior members of the attorney general's
office were involved in the first efforts by the State Police to uncover
evidence of racial profiling.

Those efforts began in the spring of 1996, weeks after a Superior Court
judge had found State Police commanders responsible for tolerating a de
facto policy of racial profiling. Publicly, the commanders proclaimed
innocence. They asserted that the judge, Robert E. Francis, a former
prosecutor, had been led astray by flawed statistics.

But privately, according to the State Police documents, they expressed
serious doubts. In their correspondence that summer, questions poured forth.
How bad was the problem? Was profiling a perception or a reality? To get
answers, they ordered internal audits, and they also began to assemble a
racial database of all the drivers arrested by each of the eight troopers
whose conduct was at issue in Judge Francis' ruling.

By fall, the first numbers were in. They were even worse than critics had
alleged. During three years on the New Jersey Turnpike, for example, 84
percent of 764 people arrested by the eight troopers were members of
minority groups.

According to meeting minutes, officials from the attorney general's office
were present at meetings in 1996 when audits were discussed. During a State
Police meeting in April 1996, for example, Deputy Attorney General John Fahy
raised the need to gather racial data on the arrests of the eight troopers
in Judge Francis' case. "If this review uncovers substantial problems," a
memorandum stated, "it would be recommended that additional thought be given
to proceeding with the appeal."

Sworn in as attorney general in July 1996, Mr. Verniero has testified that
he was briefed on the case soon after he took office, and that he authorized
that the appeal be continued.

By the end of 1996, with the Justice Department starting its inquiry, the
internal audits had begun to produce some disturbing results, and not just
about the eight troopers.

Internal affairs investigators, for example, examined 160 searches by
troopers at the Moorestown station in Burlington County during parts of 1994
and 1996. Eighty-nine percent involved minority drivers.

They pulled records on 35 searches performed by five troopers at the
Cranbury station in Middlesex County. Thirty-three were on minority drivers.
They looked at a year's worth of arrests at the Perryville station in
Hunterdon County. Of 171 people, 91 were members of minority groups.

"The numbers are not good," Sergeant Gilbert wrote in early 1997 in a
memorandum to Colonel Williams.

But according to several memorandums, State Police officials were worried
that this information would give Justice Department investigators ammunition
to expand their inquiry and, as Sergeant Gilbert described it, "jam a
monitoring system of their choosing down our throats."

To avert a sweeping investigation that might reveal "unpleasant surprises"
throughout the State Police, Sergeant Gilbert wrote, commanders decided to
turn over traffic stop data for just two stations on the New Jersey
Turnpike. This was thought to be the safest response because both stations,
in Moorestown and Cranbury, had already been criticized by Judge Francis for
racial profiling.

The strategy was raised with Mr. Verniero, according to Sergeant Gilbert's
summary of a discussion on Jan. 10, 1997, between Mr. Verniero and Colonel
Williams. "Decision reached to restrict production of data to Moorestown and
Cranbury stations," Sergeant Gilbert wrote.

A State Police spokesman said yesterday that Sergeant Gilbert would not
comment.

Chuck Davis, a spokesman for the attorney general's office, said there was
no attempt by that office to restrict information sent to the Department of
Justice.

"There was a cooperative negotiation with the Department of Justice after
which we sent all the information that the attorney general's office had,"
he said."

State Police commanders were quick to produce records that showed how they
had warned troopers for years not to engage in racial profiling. If
anything, the warnings intensified after Judge Francis' ruling. "The
Division of State Police does not, and will not, condone or tolerate any
type of racial profiling," Colonel Williams said in a message sent to all
trooper stations days after the judge ruled.

Troopers were sent to training classes on cultural diversity and traffic
stops, and State Police bulletins left little room for misinterpretation:
"The race or ethnicity of a suspect, in other words, may play no part in an
officer's decision to act," explained the New Jersey State Police Search and
Seizure Review in the fall of 1996.

But despite the warnings and internal audits, evidence of racially biased
treatment continued to mount, in some instances worsening. In 1996, blacks
made up 51.6 percent of those searched by troopers at the Cranbury and
Moorestown stations, the records show. By 1998, the number of searches
carried out by the same two stations had nearly doubled, and blacks made up
54.9 percent of those searched.

In 1998, the documents show, there were still dozens of troopers on the
turnpike who were arresting three, four and five times as many minority
drivers as white drivers.

For all the stern condemnations of racial profiling in 1996, there were few
actions to back the words. In fact, some senior officers clearly viewed the
internal audits mainly as public relations gestures. "Continued use of the
audit process will enable the division to deflect further outside criticism
concerning its perceived lack of prior effort addressing patterns of
enforcement," Sergeant Gilbert wrote in a memorandum to Colonel Williams.

There is no evidence in the available documents that audit results were used
to punish troopers. From the start of 1996 to the end of 1998, the Internal
Affairs Bureau investigated 49 complaints that troopers had treated someone
unfairly because of race, age or sex. One complaint was substantiated.

In 1996, the records show, at least a dozen black or Hispanic troopers
reported widespread profiling abuses at the Moorestown station. They
described troopers using their spotlights to determine the race of drivers
at nighttime. They told of troopers describing the race of the driver as
unknown to avoid creating a damning paper trail, and of white troopers
waving off black troopers who arrived to provide backup.

"No information or evidence was developed against any specific division
member to support this perception," the Moorestown station commander wrote
in dismissing their allegations.

Troopers had long been under standing orders to radio in the race of each
driver they stopped for safety and monitoring purposes. But the order was
widely ignored, a fact that Judge Francis found unusual for a military-style
organization that routinely reprimanded troopers for minor infractions.

Because of the judge's ruling, the State Police sent out several edicts
reminding troopers that calling in the race of drivers was mandatory.
Compliance improved, but troopers still failed to obey the order in
thousands of stops, the audits show.

More broadly, there is ample evidence in the documents that troopers had
long been exposed to mixed messages about racial profiling. For many years,
the State Police encouraged troopers to consider race and ethnicity when
deciding whether to stop motorists, the documents show. This happened as the
State Police, at the direction of several governors and attorneys general,
increasingly focused on highway drug arrests.

>From 1987 to 1992, for example, the State Police operated a Drug
Interdiction Training Unit, 10 elite troopers who trained hundreds of other
troopers in spotting drug couriers. One training plan written by a unit
supervisor offered this tip-off for recognizing drug courier drivers:
"Hispanics mainly involved."

An undated training document listed "occupant identifiers" for possible drug
couriers: "Colombian males," "Hispanic males," "Hispanic male and a black
male together." Those who carried cellular phones, displayed antidrug bumper
stickers or engaged in "friendly dialogue" were also suspect.

After a 1989 television news report alleged racial profiling on the
turnpike, a confidential memo was prepared to help the State Police
superintendent at the time, Clinton L. Pagano, respond. The memo summarized
drug intelligence reports, many from federal agencies, that described major
drug networks dominated by Colombians, Jamaicans, Cubans and Dominicans.
"Therefore," the memo concluded, "New Jersey's road troopers should
necessarily be encountering and arresting a significant number of black and
Hispanic criminals."

By the late 1990's, the documents show, references to race and ethnicity had
been removed from training materials. But the State Police continued to
receive intelligence reports that put drug dealers in broad racial and
ethnic categories.

A 1998 report, prepared by the Newark office of the United States Drug
Enforcement Administration, described local heroin traffickers as mainly
from Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Nigeria. Colonel Williams was
fired by Governor Whitman a year later for saying much the same thing in an
interview with The Star-Ledger of Newark.
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