Pubdate: Wed, 18 Oct 2000
Source: Bergen Record (NJ)
Copyright: 2000 Bergen Record Corp.
Contact:  http://www.bergen.com/cgi-bin/feedback
Website: http://www.bergen.com/
Author: James Ahearn
Note: James Ahearn is a contributing editor and former managing editor
of the Record.

MISSING THE EARLY SIGNALS OF RACIAL PROFILING

When Peter Verniero became state attorney general in July 1996 he inherited 
a problem. Four months earlier a Superior Court judge had concluded that 
state troopers patrolling the New Jersey Turnpike had singled out black and 
Hispanic drivers for traffic stops.

Some of those stops resulted in car searches and the arrest of 17 minority 
drivers on narcotics charges. The 17 were convicted but appealed, 
contending they were the victims of discriminatory treatment. Their lawyer 
presented evidence that 36 percent of drivers pulled over on the southern 
two-thirds of the turnpike were black.

The judge, Robert E. Francis, a former prosecutor, accepted this contention 
and went further. He declared, "The state police hierarchy allowed, 
condoned, cultivated, and tolerated discrimination between 1988 and 1991."

This was pretty sensational stuff but it didn't get as much attention in 
North Jersey as it deserved. Responding, the state police said that the 
judge was mistaken, that he had been misled by bad statistics. The state 
Department of Law and Public Safety prepared an appeal.

At that time the head of the department, the attorney general, was Deborah 
Poritz, now the chief justice of the state Supreme Court. She signed off on 
the appeal. We can infer that she treated this case like many others 
claiming that some part of the state government had done something wrong.

Here the accused agency was an elite police force, part of her own 
department, and the force was denying it had done anything wrong. Better to 
let the appeal go forward, she may have reasoned, so that a three-judge 
Appellate Division panel could review the evidence and the trial judge's 
conclusions.

In this case stronger action was warranted. A judge had found credible 
evidence that state troopers had horribly misused their authority. This was 
a time for top officials to take a step back and say, "Wait a minute. What 
are these guys supposed to have done? Is it possible that they really did 
it? If so, did their superiors know about it? If so, shouldn't we be 
talking about abandoning the appeal? Shouldn't we be talking instead about 
disciplinary action for those involved?"

This did not happen. What did happen was that Governor Whitman appointed 
Poritz to the Supreme Court and made her chief justice, the first woman to 
hold the job. This was widely noticed. Not so the governor's appointment of 
Peter Verniero to succeed Poritz.

Verniero had served the governor as chief counsel and chief of staff. He 
had never worked in the Department of Law and Public Safety until he became 
its chief. He inherited a raft of pending business from Poritz, including 
the state police appeal, and saw no reason to second-guess his now very 
distinguished predecessor on this item. So another opportunity was lost to 
head off a political and legal disaster.

Although the state government's table of organization located the state 
police force in the Law and Public Safety Department, the force was 
semi-autonomous. It had grown from a constabulary of 81 men in 1921 to more 
than 2,500 troopers and senior officers, backed by 1,000 civilians, with a 
budget this year of $180 million. Its leadership was ingrown, 
up-from-the-ranks guys.

The public image of a trooper is a speed-limit cop, but the department had 
shifted focus to drug-traffic interdiction. Turnpike troopers were earning 
plaudits by turning traffic stops into narcotics busts. The state police 
superintendent received regular bulletins from federal drug enforcement 
experts advising that minorities were more likely to be drug couriers than 
whites. What, in retrospect, was surprising was how zealously and 
improperly some troopers were following up on that information.

The U.S. Department of Justice got wind of problems with the New Jersey 
State Police and asked for racial data on traffic stops and arrests. 
Articles published last week by The Record and The New York Times show that 
state police commanders reacted to this request as a public relations 
problem, one that could sully the force's image. They saw their task as 
damage control.

Verniero ordered collection of fresh data. In response, a state police 
sergeant found that of 38 searches conducted on the central and southern 
portions of the turnpike on 30 randomly selected days in 1995 and 1996, no 
fewer than 31 involved minorities. The sergeant reported this to the 
superintendent.

Nor was the disparity confined to the turnpike. For example, troopers 
assigned to the Perryville station in rural Hunterdon County arrested 171 
drivers in the course of a year. Of those, 91 were minorities. State police 
commanders decided to submit to the feds only data confirming what was 
already suspected, that turnpike troopers were targeting blacks and Hispanics.

Exactly what Verniero knew and when he knew it are disputed. In 1999 he 
told senators considering his Supreme Court nomination that it was not 
until April 1998, when two turnpike troopers fired on a van carrying young 
minority men, that the reality of racial profiling crystallized in his 
mind. The governor, defending him, said his report last year acknowledging 
the problem was the first in the nation. Far from deserving censure for a 
cover-up, he should be praised, she said.

We are going to hear more about this, a great deal more. The Senate 
Judiciary Committee is gearing up for hearings. The key fact is that had 
Verniero, Poritz, or, for that matter, the governor herself stopped to 
think, stopped long enough to ask whether troopers sworn to uphold the law 
were actually subverting the rights of minority citizens, all of this 
trauma could have been avoided.
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