| Team praises police efforts to end profiling By the Associated Press (The Philadelphia Inquirer) TRENTON- New Jersey State Troopers, once accused of racisl profiling by their own supperiors, have apparently changed their act, according to the latest federal review. The court-appointed moniter says two years of reforms are helping to change a department that once routinely stopped more blacks and Hispanics than white drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike. Federal supervisors also credited increased supervision of road officers, one of the reforms ordered by the court after the U.S. Justice Department planned civil rights lawsuit in 1999. "The results of these changes are tangible," the report said. The court-appointed supervisors reviewed 175 motor vehicle stops by troopers over three months and found no evidence of racial profiling. "Members of the monitering team noted that virtually all motor vehicle stops were made for serious violations of the criminal or motor vehicle law. Gone were the stops that bordered on the pretextual," the report reads. Consent searches - a tool critics say allows police to target minorities - decreased 69 percent in the past six months, the review found. Troopers who so search people after traffic stops are finding more drugs, a sign that training has improved, the moniter wrote. The state's last review found nine "incidents" by troopers - including one where an officer threatened a black driver with a search by drug dogs. During that evaluation, the overseers watched more than 400 video tapes from traffic stops and caught some troopers violating procedure designed to protect minority drivers. One trooper appeared to interrogate a black driver after a routine traffic stop and another regularly reported alleged malfunctions with recording equipment each time he approached a minority driver, according to the reports. |