Deborah A. Jeon says little has changed since the American Civil Liberties Union first sued the Maryland State Police, accusing troopers of using race as a reason for stopping and searching minority motorists.
"State police have not taken the problem seriously," the ACLU staff lawyer maintains.
State Police Superintendent Col. David B. Mitchell argues to the contrary, pointing to changes his agency has made in the past six years. "We do not tolerate racial profiling," Mitchell says emphatically.
Years after two lawsuits were filed on behalf of minority drivers in federal court, the ACLU and state police remain at odds over what is happening on Maryland's highways.
A new state law, which becomes effective Sunday, will require all police agencies to keep statistics on drivers pulled over by officers, in an effort to eliminate race-based traffic stops.
The requirements are essentially what Maryland State Police officers have been doing since the 1995 settlement of the ACLU's first lawsuit over racial profiling.
But the wrangling between lawyers for the ACLU and state police in a 1998 lawsuit, over traffic stops on a stretch of Interstate 95, shows how difficult it can be to demonstrate racial profiling is occurring.
At the center of the current debate are troopers who patrol 50 miles of Interstate 95 between Baltimore and Delaware known as the John F. Kennedy Memorial Highway.
The ACLU alleges in its lawsuit that troopers in the JFK Barracks, in Cecil County just north of the Susquehanna River, use race when deciding to search cars driven by minority drivers.
As evidence of continued racial profiling, ACLU lawyers point to statistics compiled by the state police that show far more minorities are searched than whites. Last year, black and minority drivers were three times more likely to be searched than white drivers.
Question of statistics
But state police dispute that claim, saying statistics do not reflect the whole story. Independent statisticians say they might be right.
Troopers in the JFK Barracks are finding drugs at roughly the same rate on blacks and whites - 41 percent vs. 48 percent, respectively, last year.
If they were discriminating, these statisticians say, the so-called "find rate" for blacks would be expected to drop.
"It shows they are looking for drugs," said Dwight D. Steward, a statistician and economics professor with the University of Texas, who analyzed the data for The Sun. "You can have a search rate that is out of whack and it's not racial profiling."
