By Andrea F. Siegel , andrea.siegel@baltsun.com|May 12, 2009
In the five years since Maryland State Police agreed to change procedures to settle accusations of racial profiling, about 100 motorists lodged complaints.
Not one allegation contending that the practice occurred during traffic stops has been upheld in police internal investigations.
On Monday, a dispute over records of those investigations landed in Maryland's second-highest court. Lawyers for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and American Civil Liberties Union argued that the public should be able to learn how those probes were handled, while an assistant attorney general countered that the documents are personnel records because even with troopers' identities blacked out, the officers can be identified.
Personnel files are exempt from disclosure under the Maryland Public Information Act.
"This is a case about government accountability," contended Seth Rosenthal, a Venable attorney representing the NAACP, saying the records "would show whether the state police not only are talking the talk ... but walking the walk" after they promised to end profiling.
Not so, countered Assistant Attorney General David R. Moore, arguing that removing names from the complaints and files does not protect the troopers' privacy rights, since patrol schedules could be matched against reports.
Besides, he said, a finding of no profiling does not mean that other disciplinary actions were not taken.
The case has roots in a 1992 traffic stop in Cumberland. A trooper stopped lawyer Robert Wilkins' car and searched it for drugs. Wilkins is black, and he and his family were on their way home from his grandfather's funeral.
"When I was stopped by the police, they took the position that if I had nothing to hide, then what was the problem with being searched," Wilkins said Tuesday after watching a three-judge appeals panel in Annapolis quiz lawyers.
Now, he said, the public could be suspicious because no complaints were upheld. "If you've got nothing to hide, then what's the problem?" he said.
In 2003, the state police, the ACLU and the NAACP reached an agreement that ended an 11-year legal battle.
The consent degree provided, among other things, for officer training, quarterly reports on traffic stops and searches, the outcome of racial profiling investigations and the creation of a brochure for motorists on how to lodge a complaint.
