This blatant, daily practice of racial discrimination-- "profiling" in the sanitized terminology used by the cops and their superiors--has a long history in New Jersey and elsewhere. Its roots go back to the attack on democratic rights launched by the federal and state governments in the 1980s under the guise of a "war on drugs." Since the Drug Enforcement Administration set up "Operation Pipeline" in 1986 as a federal program allegedly aimed at "drug couriers," the DEA and Department of Transportation have financed and organized an range of programs that "emphasize the ethnic and racial characteristics of narcotics organizations," according to the New York Times. These were backed locally in New Jersey by such legislation as the 1987 Uniform Drug Reform Act, and gave cops a virtually free hand to stop and search vehicles. Among the characteristics cops are trained to look for are people with dreadlocks and two Latino males traveling together, the Times reports.

One newly released state police file is an internal review dated September 5, 1989, and marked "Confidential." It shows how complaints over "profiling" were, in the past, simply dismissed with openly racist arguments.

No "bias" was involved in "the fact that more blacks are arrested than whites," the 1989 review found. To the contrary, state police maintained, arrests turn out that way because more criminals are Black or Latino.

Most turnpike arrests were on charges related to drugs and weapons, they said in the review, and it is a "documented criminal phenomenon" that this is an area "heavily comprised of American blacks, Jamaican gangs, Colombian cartels, Cuban exiles and Dominican criminals."

Lying behind the release of the documents are a number of developments over the last few years in which normal, everyday past practices have turned out to carry, today, a higher than anticipated political price.

One is the case of four basketball players--three Black, one Latino--who were stopped on the turnpike near Trenton in April 1998 by two white troopers who fired 11 shots into the van they were driving. Anger over this chilling incident of police brutality, although far from the first of its kind, simply refuses to go away. The case returned to the news at the end of October, just a few weeks prior to the current release of documents, when a state court dismissed all criminal charges against the troopers.

Another was the racist public statement made by state police superintendent Carl Willams in February 1999. In a question of drugs, he told the Newark Star Ledger in a published interview, "it's most likely a minority group that's involved." Governor Christine Whitman, who in general had defended the troopers and their brass against all criticism, was forced to fire Williams the day the interview appeared.

A third was the debate on police conduct that erupted unexpectedly in the state legislature for three months in the spring of 1999. Whitman had nominated to the state supreme court Peter Verniero, then attorney general and responsible for the state police at the time of the turnpike shooting. The nomination, under normal circumstances a shoo-in, barely received the minimum number of votes needed in the state legislature.

A fourth was the fallout over the unplanned and unexpected publication in the national big-business media in July of a forgotten photo of a smirking Whitman personally frisking a Black "suspect" during a 1996 police operation in Camden.

The documents themselves are being reviewed by lawyers for 150 of those arrested in cop operations on the turnpike, who have filed suit demanding the cases against them be dismissed. More suits are expected, including by working people put behind bars after New Jersey state cops illegally searched their vehicles.  
 
 
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