MarijuanaNews.com : Racial Profiling Was Encouraged by the DEA, Says New Jersey. Surprise! Surprise!

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Posted November 29, 2000
(MarijuanaNews note: Violations of basic human rights are intrinsic,
not incidental to marijuana prohibition. Marijuana prohibition was born in racism, but
that is only one facet of the way that it has been used to systematically undermine
individual rights.
See
The Racist Origins Of Canada’s
Marijuana Prohibition Reported In the National Post.

Racial minorities have been the most obvious victims, but
the poor of all races are the most vulnerable to bad laws. While this article deals with
racism, Americans and Canadians are much more reluctant to deal with issues of class in
the unequal application of the criminal justice system.
See
Operation
Pipeline Designed By DEA For Nationwide System To Search Cars Without Cause;”Once
they’ve given consent, they’ve dug their own grave.”
and
Ottawa Citizen
Practices First Class Journalism
A Brilliantly Insightful Editorial: “Marijuana isn’t just a serious issue.
It’s huge.”

This is the kind of journalism for which the Times is famous. Unfortunately, it
has been all too rare in its coverage of the Drug War.

Readers of MarijuanaNews.com will not be surprised.)

November 29, 2000
From The New York Times
letters@nytimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/
http://forums.nytimes.com/comment/
By David Kocieniewski
U.S. WROTE OUTLINE FOR RACE PROFILING, NEW JERSEY ARGUES

TRENTON, Nov. 28 - Weaving its way through the 91,000 pages of documents on racial
profiling released by New Jersey officials is a largely overlooked thread in the national
debate on race and crime - although states like New Jersey have been the most egregious
offenders, the textbook on singling out minority drivers was written
by the federal government.

New Jersey officials contend that the reason racial profiling is a
national problem is that it was initiated, and in many ways encouraged, by the federal
government’s war on drugs. In 1986, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Operation
Pipeline enlisted police departments across the country to search for narcotics
traffickers on major highways and told officers, to cite one example, that Latinos and
West Indians dominated the drug trade and therefore warranted extra scrutiny.

Since then, the D.E.A. and the Department of Transportation have
financed and taught an array of drug interdiction programs that emphasize the ethnic and
racial characteristics of narcotics organizations and teach the police ways to single out
cars and drivers who are smuggling.

Among the characteristics officers in Operation Pipeline have been trained to look for:
people with dreadlocks and cars with two Latino males traveling together.

Federal officials contend that they have never taught profiling and that police
departments that use racially discriminatory tactics are misapplying the D.E.A.’s
intelligence reports. Federal officials have taken several steps in recent years intended
to measure the problem, most notably President Clinton’s 1999 executive order that any
police force that receives federal money for drug interdiction must keep track of the race
of anyone stopped, searched or arrested by officers.

But even the national American Civil Liberties Union, a persistent critic of state
policies on racial profiling, said much of the blame for the policy fell on the Drug
Enforcement Administration.
See
ACLU Report On DEA’s
“Operation Pipeline” Documents
History Of Racial Inequity In Traffic Stops

And in May 1998, as the Department of Justice was investigating whether the New Jersey
State Police needed a federal monitor to oversee its efforts to deter profiling, Anthony
J. Senneca, agent in charge of the D.E.A.’s Newark office, wrote to
state police officials to praise the troopers’ methods and effectiveness on the turnpike.

The letter singled out the exemplary work of five troopers,
including John Hogan, who one month earlier was involved in the April 1998 shootings of
three unarmed minority men on the New Jersey Turnpike, an incident that propelled racial
profiling onto the nation’s political agenda.

David Harris, a University of Toledo law professor who has written extensively about
racial profiling, said that the Drug Enforcement Administration had conveyed similar mixed
messages across the country and that results of the Operation Pipeline training had led to
discrimination in states as diverse as Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New
Mexico and Texas.

In response to that criticism, the Department of Justice’s civil rights division reviewed
D.E.A. procedures, including the Operation Pipeline training, in 1997, according to Kara
Peterman, a department spokeswoman. She declined to characterize the findings. But two
other federal officials said the Justice Department had concluded that the program was
sound and that the Drug Enforcement Administration did not encourage or teach profiling.

Civil rights advocates say the Justice Department’s response stemmed from a reluctance to
criticize an agency it oversees. But New Jersey’s attorney general, John J. Farmer Jr.,
offers a more empathetic interpretation.

“In a lot of ways, the Justice Department in Washington has been going through what
we in New Jersey went through,” Mr. Farmer said today. “The troopers in the
field were given a mixed message. On one hand, we were training them not to take race into
account. On the other hand, all the intelligence featured race and ethnicity prominently.
So what is your average road trooper to make of all this?”

Few in law enforcement foresaw such an outcome in 1986, when Operation Pipeline began as a
way to use municipal police departments as an aggressive force in the national crusade
against drugs. The program, which has been used to train more than 25,000 officers in 48
states, offered the police access to Drug Enforcement Administration intelligence reports,
which included detailed descriptions of ethnic drug gangs and the cartels.
See
Kansas Highway
Searches Find Far More Marijuana Than Hard Drugs;
Police Admit They Are Having No Effect, But They Are Really Making Things Worse:
Aggravating Drug Problem, Reducing Freedom, Wasting Police Resources. Operation Pipeline

As early as 1987, however, those D.E.A. updates had been transformed into questionable
tactics in New Jersey. One 1987 state police training memo listed the following as
identifiers of possible drug couriers: Colombian males, Hispanic males, a Hispanic male
and a black male together, or a Hispanic male and female posing as a couple.

Officially, the state police were on record as stating that racial profiling was illegal
and prohibited. But in a 1999 memo, Deputy Attorney General Debra L. Stone said her
investigation of the force found that in the patrol cars and on the state’s highways,
“racial profiling exists as part of the culture.”

“There’s no written policy on it,” she said, “but you are taught that if
you see `Johnnies’ in a `good car,’ they don’t belong and should be stopped.”

Mr. Harris, who wrote the A.C.L.U. report titled “Driving While
Black,” said a similar pattern of official denials and de facto profiling cropped up
in many states where Operation Pipeline was embraced by local commanders.

“The D.E.A. has been the great evangelizer for racial profiling on the
highways,” he said.

“They had used the technique in airports to nab drug couriers and thought
this held great promise on the highways. So they taught it to local departments, and
because the D.E.A. agents weren’t the ones actually pulling over the cars, they’ve never
been really held accountable for it.”

Drug Enforcement Administration officials emphatically dispute the notion that they taught
or encouraged unequal enforcement of the law.

Michael Chapman, a D.E.A. spokesman, said today that the agency trained officers not to
consider race when deciding whether to pull over a car and to use it as only one of many
factors when considering whether to search a vehicle.

“We teach them that profiling is illegal and it is also bad investigative
technique,” Mr. Chapman said.

Nonetheless, much of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s emphasis
on the race and ethnicity of drug traffickers endures. During the last five years, the
D.E.A. has stopped distributing training videos in which all the drug suspects have
Spanish surnames. But just last year, the agency’s Newark office released the “Heroin
Trends” report, which noted:

“Predominant wholesale traffickers are Colombian, followed by Dominicans, Chinese,
West African/Nigerian, Pakistani, Hispanic and Indian. Midlevels are dominated by
Dominicans, Colombians, Puerto Ricans, African-Americans and Nigerians.”

Meanwhile, federal agencies like the Department of Transportation have also sponsored drug
interdiction programs that make similar observations. And a 1998
report by Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, director of the White House Office of National Drug
Control Policy, stunned New Jersey officials because it gave detailed breakdowns of the
ethnic and racial backgrounds of sellers, traffickers and users alike.

Hugh B. Price, president and chief executive of the National Urban League, said today that
he hoped that the public attention focused on New Jersey’s racial profiling would induce
the federal government to address the causes of racial profiling as
well as the symptoms, even if part of the blame lay within the Justice Department itself.
(MarijuanaNews note: The African-American leadership
continues to support the Drug War, while opposing its racism. If prohibition really worked
then this might make sense, but it has simply filled the prisons with blacks while filling
black neighborhoods with drug trafficking.)

“These are federal civil rights that are at risk and are undermined, and
we want the federal government to put force on this issue,” Mr. Price said.