Studies fuel racial profiling debate

NEWARK, N.J. -- In New Jersey, researchers used radar guns and cameras to examine whether blacks speed more than whites. In North Carolina, they got into moving vehicles and looked out the windows at speeders. In Florida, students stood on corners and counted cars.

The 1998 shooting of four minority motorists on the New Jersey Turnpike and the state's subsequent acknowledgment that police had targeted motorists for traffic stops based on race has sparked nationwide attention on racial profiling.

More recently, it's generated fierce debate among academics as to which of the dozens of studies under way should be believed.

A study commissioned by the state and released last week concluded that blacks speed at a higher rate than whites.

Researchers checked speeds with laser guns and photographed thousands of motorists.

Civil rights advocates said the study was an attempt by the state to vindicate itself from charges of profiling. The Justice Department said the study's methodology was flawed, and police union officials said the research exonerated them.

"It's a tough thing to do inquiry in because there are so many people with such sharply divergent points of view who want to claim victory," said David Harris, a Toledo, Ohio, law professor who has written a book on racial profiling. "We're better off doing the work the right the way and generating the right sets of facts."

Finding which way is right is the current job of Lorie Fridell, who will release a how-to guide in the next few months to help the nation's police departments monitor themselves for profiling.

Fridell, of the Police Executive Research Forum, is using part of a $250,000 federal grant to sift through a 3-foot-high pile of racial profiling studies commissioned by police departments.

She likes some methods better than others. Driving in a car alongside speeding motorists, she thinks, might be better than photographing them as they drive by.

"I would think you could look left and see who's in the car next to you," she says.

Observation, or placing people in strategic points on the road and having them take data on the cars that pass, "has some great potential if we can make it cost-effective," she said.

But the debate is recent and the process still in its infancy, she said.

Scott Decker, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, said numbers in studies can be skewed by competing interests to seem that more minorities are being unfairly targeted, when perhaps the opposite is true.

Decker completed one of the more comprehensive studies in the past few years of 600 Missouri cities, using question-and-answer cards filled out by police officers who made traffic stops.

The study also looked at the black population in the state, which is about 10 percent. But Decker said the study's results could be skewed if one used that 10 percent "denominator" when looking at traffic stops in St. Louis, which has a 50 percent black population. The numbers game can be numbing, he said.

"You're never going to get to perfect."

Matthew Zingraff, a North Carolina State University researcher who completed a 2000 study on racial profiling using observation from moving cars, said taking pictures of passing motorists may make it difficult to detect their race.

Geoffrey Alpert, a University of South Carolina researcher conducting a study of Dade County, Fla., prefers having students count passing cars at certain intersections. Census data, he said, can't be relied upon because the question is not who drives, but who speeds as well.

Harris said many studies are not relevant because they only record traffic stops and not the searches that may follow. James Lange, who prepared the New Jersey study at the Public Services Research Institute in Calverton, Md., said last week that his study only addresses part of the racial profiling problem.

The researchers said racial profiling became the hot issue to study shortly after the problems were revealed on New Jersey roads. They say they regularly swap ideas and will continue to share techniques until they get it right.

"We talk all the time," Alpert said. "I don't think anyone is territorial. This is science."

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On the Net:

North Carolina study, http://www.nccrimecontrol.org

Missouri study, http://www.ago.state.mo.us

Police Research, http://www.policeforum.org