Pubdate: Thu, 23 Dec 1999 Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA) Copyright: 1999 San Jose Mercury News Contact: 750 Ridder Park Drive, San Jose, CA 95190 Fax: (408) 271-3792 Website: http://www.sjmercury.com/ ARE OUR COPS COLORBLIND? EARLIER this year, San Jose was one of the first California communities to commit to documenting the race and ethnicity of drivers that the police pull over. Last week, it became the first to release numbers. The results don't prove racial profiling, but they won't end the debate over it either. In the first three months they kept tabs, the police did pull over a disproportionate number of Latino and African-American drivers. While wide enough to feed suspicion, the disparity is also narrow enough to give credence to Chief Bill Lansdowne's explanation for it. If, indeed, there is racial profiling in San Jose -- hauling over drivers based on their race and ethnicity alone -- it's nothing on the magnitude of New Jersey. There, in a 20-month study, three-quarters of the drivers whose cars were searched on the turnpike were black or Latino, yet those groups make up about a fifth of the state's population. In San Jose's case, Latinos, who are an estimated 31 percent of San Jose's population, constituted 43 percent of 23,425 car stops between July 1 and Sept. 30. African-Americans, with 4.5 percent of the population, made up 7 percent of the stops. Whites were underrepresented, with 43 percent of the population but only 29 percent of the stops, as were Asian-Americans, who make up 21 percent of the city but only 16 percent of stops. American Indians and others were the remaining 5 percent. To civil rights organizations, which have received complaints from minority drivers who say they've been hassled by the police, the numbers speak for themselves. ``I'm sad to say it is obvious by the way that minorities are being stopped that they are being targeted,'' said Victor Garza, chairman of La Raza Roundtable, a Latino organization. But Lansdowne says that demographics other than race appear to account for the variations. The department draws precinct boundaries and assigns officers to them based on crime statistics and calls for assistance. So higher crime sections -- parts of downtown and East San Jose -- have a higher concentration of police officers in smaller areas, substantially raising the odds that speeders and drivers wanted on a warrant will be spotted and stopped. These are also the areas with the highest concentrations of minorities and the poor, who are more likely to be driving clunkers without tail lights. Furthermore, if there were profiling, you might expect disproportionate numbers of minorities to be stopped in areas where few live, such as African-Americans in Almaden Valley. But nothing indicating this jumps out of the precinct numbers. Lansdowne's theory sounds plausible, but it's based only on a sense of where people live. The department didn't do a breakdown of race and ethnicity by precinct -- a picture that can be compiled with Census data. If, for example, high concentrations of Asian-Americans also live in the busier precincts, their numbers of stops also would be higher, instead of lower. (Unfortunately, accurate information won't be available until April 2001, with the release of the 2000 Census.) The report also doesn't answer another key question: whether minority drivers and their cars are searched disproportionately. In New Jersey, it wasn't the percentage of stops as much as the ratio of searches that was blatantly discriminatory. Lansdowne says the problem is technical -- computer capacity -- but he's willing to consider solutions, such as revising questions and eventually buying new computers. Finally, the computerized reporting system is designed to track stops by shift and by precinct, not to detect profiling by rogue cops. Earlier this year, an African-American youth minister claimed he was stopped for no reason in San Jose, treated like a criminal, then released with no citation. That incident and national publicity on race profiling have led some Latinos and African-Americans to mistrust the police. Lansdowne kept his promise of releasing the first batch of data on car stops and has offered to continue meeting with community groups. His openness is encouraging. But the department needs to collect more and better information. And it should hire an independent statistician to do the next analysis. Perhaps then Lansdowne can prove indisputably that profiling is a misperception, at least in San Jose. - --- MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart