Pubdate: Sun, 01 Jul 2001
Source: Seattle Times (WA)
Copyright: 2001 The Seattle Times Company
Contact:  http://www.seattletimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/409
Author: Lori Montgomery
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/racial.htm (Racial Issues)

LAW-ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES DO SOME SOUL-SEARCHING OVER RACIAL PROFILING

A troubling self-portrait has emerged a year after hundreds of police 
agencies began investigating the use of racial profiling by their 
officers, and a growing number of departments are responding with 
policies to discourage harassment of innocent minority travelers. In 
Washington, the State Patrol plans to use its data to question and 
discipline individual troopers whose records suggest racial 
profiling. Former Chief Annette Sandberg also canceled awards for 
drug arrests, saying they may encourage troopers to use profiles 
instead of focusing on hazardous drivers, thus rewarding "the wrong 
kind of behavior."

In San Diego, city police have hired academic consultants and plan to 
convene focus groups to try to understand why officers stop and 
search black and Hispanic drivers at rates far higher than white 
drivers.

And last month, the California Highway Patrol (CHP) declared a 
six-month moratorium on consent searches, the focus of a class-action 
lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which says the 
searches disproportionately target minorities. Troopers must now 
develop probable cause of criminal activity before searching a 
vehicle instead of relying on driver consent.

Some officers think "we're giving up the store" by voluntarily 
halting consent searches, said CHP Commissioner D.O. "Spike" Helmick. 
"But it's incumbent upon us to stand back and look at what we're 
doing."

The U.S. Customs Service appears to be the first agency to 
significantly reduce the number of minorities searched for 
contraband. After enacting far-reaching reforms that include 
requiring supervisory approval for every intrusive search, Customs 
slashed body searches by nearly 80 percent at the nation's airports 
from 1998 to 2000 and has increased drug seizures by 38 percent since 
1999.

Long accused of inappropriately targeting black and Hispanic air 
passengers, Customs is providing strong evidence, analysts say, that 
good police work can spare minority travelers the indignity of 
criminal suspicion.

Meanwhile, numerous police chiefs nationwide have been genuinely 
troubled by the portraits their data paint. And many are proving 
willing to probe deeper.

"Some departments are still saying, 'No, we're not doing it,' even 
though the numbers show something different. But a fair number of 
departments are now saying, 'This is something that undercuts our 
ability to serve all of our clients, and we want to know what's going 
on and what to do about it,' " said John Lamberth, a psychology 
professor at Temple University and a leading analyst of racially 
biased police practices.

Keeping Track

Racial profiling emerged as a national concern after widely 
publicized incidents indicating that police use ethnicity and skin 
color to make law-enforcement decisions. A recent Washington Post 
survey found that more than half of black men and one in five 
Hispanic and Asian men say they've been victims of racially biased 
policing.

In February, President Bush told Congress that racial profiling "is 
wrong, and we must end it." At least 13 states have passed laws 
requiring police to collect traffic-stop data. The Clinton 
administration ordered a variety of federal agencies to keep similar 
data.

At least eight agencies are collecting data by order of a federal 
court or under agreement with the U.S. Justice Department. Among 
them: the Montgomery County (Md.) police, Maryland State Police and 
New Jersey State Police, which brought the profiling debate to a boil 
in April 1998 when two troopers opened fire on a van carrying four 
unarmed black and Hispanic men on the New Jersey Turnpike.

In all, about 400 of the nation's 18,000 police agencies are 
collecting data, according to researchers at Boston's Northeastern 
University. About half have completed their first reports, said Amy 
Farrell of Northeastern's Center for Criminal Justice Policy Research.

Regardless of what the numbers show, the "overwhelming conclusion" 
has been that "we don't have a problem," Farrell said.

Many police remain deeply wary of data collection, arguing that 
statistics fuel allegations of racism without offering clear 
solutions. No one has devised a satisfactory method for identifying 
the racial makeup of a patrolled population, making it difficult to 
interpret the data.

Among the skeptics is Maryland State Police Superintendent David 
Mitchell. In 1995, an ACLU lawsuit forced the Maryland police to 
become the first major department in the nation to collect data on 
traffic stops.

Since then, Mitchell has enacted reforms that have cut searches of 
minority drivers. But he has refused to address lingering questions 
about why cars driven by minorities still make up more than 60 
percent of vehicle searches on Interstate 95, dismissing the numbers 
as a reflection of the broader reality that minorities are more often 
arrested for crimes.

"The issue of race is easy to raise and, frankly, hard to defend 
against," Mitchell said. "This is not a perfect world. Our numbers 
are never going to be perfect."

That attitude is still common in the law-enforcement community. 
What's different now is a vanguard of "smart departments" taking 
action to improve their statistics, Farrell and others said.

Customs Steps In

The U.S. Customs Service is leading the pack.

"There's no doubt about it: They're doing a better job," said Ed Fox, 
a lawyer who represents 90 black women who sued Customs after being 
frisked or more in 1997 and 1998 at Chicago's O'Hare International 
Airport. "They've stopped picking on the people who don't carry 
drugs."

The transformation began in the late 1990s, after a spate of lawsuits 
accused Customs inspectors of singling out minority air passengers, 
particularly women, for strip-searches. The most notorious case 
involved Amanda Buritica, a Hispanic school-crossing guard from Port 
Chester, N.Y., who was stopped in San Francisco on her way home from 
Hong Kong.

Buritica was handcuffed, transferred to a hospital and forced to 
swallow powerful laxatives that caused her to move her bowels 28 
times. No drugs were found. After 25 hours, Buritica was released 
without so much as an apology.

Customs has broad constitutional authority to defend the nation's 
borders, including the power to search anyone and anything entering 
the country. Top officials were largely unconcerned by cases like 
Buritica's, said Raymond Kelly, then Customs commissioner.

"Their feeling was: 'Hey, it's a legal deal. We're winning the 
lawsuits,' " Kelly said in an interview. "My response was: 'Yes, 
you're winning the lawsuits, but you're abusing U.S. citizens. ' "

Kelly ordered inspectors to begin keeping detailed records on 
passenger searches, which were delivered to him each morning. Then he 
used the threat of a congressional inquiry into allegations of racial 
profiling, looming in May 1999, to persuade officials to adopt 
far-reaching reforms.

No longer could inspectors touch anyone without a supervisor's 
approval. If there was reason to believe a passenger had swallowed 
drugs, only the port director could authorize removal to a medical 
facility.

Port directors were ordered to consult a lawyer before approving 
X-rays or monitored bowel movements and to reassess detentions every 
few hours.

Kelly also made it more difficult to justify searches. He banned a 
list of 80 triggers that branded virtually anyone a potential drug 
courier, including passengers who were uncooperative or too 
cooperative, nervous or too calm, wearing sunglasses or bulky 
clothing.

"If you're stopping a disproportionate number of minorities, there 
may be good reasons for it. But they have to be articulated," Kelly 
said. "People should not be searched just because of a vague notion 
in some inspector's head."

Finally, Kelly acted to make searches less intimidating. Inspectors 
must now disclose reasons for the search, offer to call relatives if 
detention lasts more than two hours, pay for hotels and missed 
flights, and give searched passengers a comment card pre-addressed to 
Customs headquarters.

At first, inspectors were wary. Searches - and drug seizures - 
plunged. But inspectors soon realized Kelly was not trying to 
identify scapegoats, said Robert Meekins, deputy port director at 
John F. Kennedy International Airport.

The result: Pat downs, X-rays and other body searches dropped from 
more than 40,000 in 1998 to fewer than 10,000 last year. Seizures of 
drugs and contraband rose from 4 percent of searches in 1998 to 
nearly 18 percent so far this year.

Minorities still account for more than two-thirds of searches, a fact 
that may never change, Kelly said. Flights from Jamaica, Colombia, 
Africa and the Caribbean produce the vast majority of drug seizures, 
and those flights tend to be packed with black and Hispanic 
travelers, Customs officials said.

But compared with 1998, nearly 16,000 fewer black and Hispanic 
travelers were physically accosted last year, according to Customs.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Josh Sutcliffe