Racial profiling on the Jersey Turnpike: the issue has brought
down some of the Garden State’s highest echelons of law
enforcement, embarrassed a recent governor of the state to the
point she fled to Washington, D.C., and driven another thorn into
the side of America’s racial comity.
Two years ago charges of State Police picking on black and
Hispanic drivers for stops and ticketing had reached a crescendo
and the Justice Department was leaning on the state officialdom to
stop racial profiling and to study the driving habits of the races.
Were they found to be the same among races, then the disparity of
police stops would support the profiling allegations.
The New Jersey attorney general’s office commissioned a $500,000
study. High speed photography would snap images of drivers in a
variety of locations along the turnpike, on the upper reaches where
the speed limit is 55 and on the lower reaches where it is 65.
Researchers showed photos of 38,747 drivers to teams of three
evaluators whose task was to determine the driver’s race. The
identifying teams did not know which among the photos were of
speeders. At first, if two of the three evaluators agreed, the
photo stayed in the pool. This eliminated some 12,000 photos.
But of the 26,334 remaining, it was found that nearly twice the
percentage of blacks as whites were speeders in the 65 mile limit
zone. The percentage of violators by race was nearly the same in
the 55-mile zone. Speeding was classified as 15 miles per hour over
the posted limit, and the higher the speed the greater the racial
disparity.
Unsatisfied, the Justice Department reportedly asked the
evaluators to go back to the drawing board: two out of three might
be flawed (shades of the hanging chads of Florida). So the
researchers eliminated all photos except those on which there was
complete unanimity on the question of driver race. Three out of
three. Result of the fine-tuning: no difference.
The New York Times reports the Justice Department has asked the
New Jersey attorney general not to release the report. Federal
attorney Mark Posner of the Justice Department’s special litigation
section is quoted as writing he fears the results may have been
skewed somehow by factors such as glare on windshields.
The New Jersey State Trooper’s Union is calling for release of
the report, noting it was funded by taxpayers’ money. Kenneth
McClelland, president of the troopers union, is quoted as saying,
“The Justice Department doesn’t want this study out there, because
it flies in the face of everything they said about profiling. And
it proves what we said, that the vast majority of troopers were
stopping people because of the way they drove, not because of their
race.”
How Justice deals with windshield glare is yet to be learned,
but as one grasshopper said to another as they were approached by
an Oldsmobile on the turnpike: “This takes guts.”
