Racial profiling causes national debate about recent studies
By Amy Westfeldt
Associated Press

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 national furor over racial profiling by police has also generated fierce debate among academics over what is the most reliable way of detecting the practice.

For police departments suspected of singling out black and Hispanic motorists, the political and legal stakes are high: The highway studies could exonerate the police or implicate them.

The debate over what some minorities sarcastically call “driving while black” flared in 1998 after state troopers opened fire on four black and Hispanic motorists on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Since then, dozens of police departments and other agencies around the country have been studying traffic stops or other driving patterns to determine whether minorities are being unfairly pulled over and searched for speeding and other violations.

In New Jersey, a study commissioned by the state and released last week concluded that blacks are more likely than whites to speed on the highway. The researchers checked speeds with laser guns and photographed thousands of motorists.

The troopers union claimed vindication. Civil rights advocates objected bitterly to the findings. And the U.S. Justice Department — which had requested the study — asked that it be withheld, arguing that its methodology was flawed.

“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.

Finding which way is best is the current job of Lorie Fridell, a researcher with the Police Executive Research Forum who will release a how-to guide in the next few months to help the nation’s police departments monitor themselves for profiling.

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

She likes some methods better than others. Driving in a car alongside speeding motorists, she said, might be more reliable than trying to identify a driver’s race from a blurry photograph.

“I would think you could look left and see who’s in the car next to you,” Fridell said.

And placing people at strategic points on the road and having them take down information on passing cars “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.
“There are lots of different ideas,” she said. “What’s frustrating to social scientists is that there’s none that is great.”

North Carolina State University professor Matthew Zingraff conducted a study that involved observing other drivers from moving cars and looking for differences between blacks and others when it came to speeding and other driving habits. The results have not been released.

Geoffrey Alpert, a University of South Carolina professor conducting a study in Dade County, Fla., said he prefers having students observe passing cars at certain intersections. He plans to compare his findings to data collected from police on traffic stops.

Researchers said they regularly swap ideas and will continue to do so until they get it right.

“I don’t think anyone is territorial,” Alpert said. “This is science.”

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