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Stop racial profiling
© St. Petersburg Times, published December 23, 2000 We have known for some time that the United States is losing the war on drugs. But documents now coming out of New Jersey shed new light on the extent to which equal protection and fairness have been casualties of that war. Over the past decade, at least eighty percent of the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike selected for search by state troopers have been driven by minorities, according to files recently released by New Jersey Attorney General John Farmer. Seventy percent of the time, those searches turned up nothing. The numbers are as alarming as they are stark. They confirm what Farmer himself acknowledged: that racial profiling has long been routine state procedure, and while nabbing drivers solely on the basis of skin color has yielded some arrests -- as would even the most random process -- the practice has inflicted a human toll far greater than any crime-fighting success it has achieved. But the documents also provide new insight into the source of that profiling. While they have put the state's former attorney general (now supreme court justice) on the hot seat for possibly concealing what he knew, the documents have also pointed a finger at the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. Farmer and others say it was the federal government, acting through the DEA, that initiated and encouraged racial profiling as it enlisted the help of states in cracking down on highway drug trafficking. The DEA continues to deny that it taught unequal enforcement, but evidence is strong that the federal government -- with a wink if not a nod -- sanctioned discrimination as a tool in its ever-escalating fight against drugs. The question now is whether that same government is prepared to right the wrongs it set in motion and address the cause of racial profiling along with its symptoms. As late as 1997, the U.S. Department of Justice, which oversees the DEA, defended the drug agency's practices and procedures. The next attorney general should make it clear that racial profiling has no place in the nation's law enforcement.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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From the Times Opinion page |
