Renting
While
Non-White
4/30/99
Issue #87 of the Week Online reported that Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) had reintroduced the Traffic Stops Statistics Act, addressing the problem of racial profiling in highway searches, popularly known as "Driving While Black" (http://www.drcnet.org/wol/087.html#profiling). An article in the 4/29 issue of the New York Times revealed that New Jersey state troopers are aggressively expanding the scope of their anti-drug surveillance operations into the private businesses surrounding the highways, bringing the same profiling and general privacy problems to the area of overnight hotel and motel rentals. "New Jersey Police Enlist Hotel Workers in the War on Drugs" reports on the "Hotel-Motel Program," an initiative in which hotel staff are trained by troopers to scrutinize guests and asked to provide troopers with access to credit card receipts and registration forms without a warrant. Troopers offer $1,000 rewards to hotel workers whose tips lead to successful seizures and arrests. Several hotel employees and union leaders have reported that troopers have suggested that hotel staff use racial profiles. Clo Smith, a clerk at the Holiday Inn near Newark Airport, told the New York Times that a state police detective said Spanish-speaking guests should be treated with more suspicion than guests who speak English, when she attended the one-hour seminar three years ago. The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey has a class action lawsuit pending against the New Jersey State Police for racial profiling in traffic stop searches. Lenora Lapidus, ACLU-NJ legal director, told the Week Online, "I think this demonstrates one more example of the state police using race-based tactics in enforcing the drug laws." In a remarkable concession, New Jersey's Attorney General, Peter Verniero, announced the state would not appeal a 1996 ruling that state troopers demonstrated racial bias in pulling over motorists. A report released by the Attorney General's office found that complaints leveled by African American and Latino motorists were "real, not imagined," and recommended that the department monitor traffic stops more closely. Lapidus told the Week Online that "the Attorney General's report noted a circularity: If you only search minorities, you'll only find minorities who are engaged in drug trafficking. But you'll go by all the whites who are trafficking drugs, and worse, will have unfairly subjected large numbers of innocent minority motorists to searches." Hotel-Motel has also raised concerns about privacy. Robert Field, owner of the Days Inn near Newark Airport, told the New York Times that he and his manager agreed it would be intrusive for troopers to have permission to arbitrarily search through registration cards and credit card slips. "It's like a tactic out of some dictatorship," said Field. "When a person checks into a hotel, he or she has a reasonable assumption that the place of business will protect their privacy, not treat them like a criminal." Jan Larsen, president of the New Jersey Hotel Association, who runs the East Brunswick Hilton, told the New York Times, "We wouldn't allow the police to look through our records without a subpoena, period. We have an obligation to protect people's privacy. I would think there's a civil liability if we start giving our information." Some hotel chains, including Hilton, forbid their managers from allowing police to inspect the records of their guests without a subpoena. Some chains allow the individual managers to make that decision. While hotel owners may voluntarily allow police access to their guest records, and searches based on voluntarily-provided information are legal, some have questioned whether participation in the Hotel-Motel program is fully voluntary. Lapidus commented, "Some hotels may feel coerced into going along with this program." Indeed, David Feedback, president of Hotel and Restaurant Employees Local 69 in Secaucus, told the New York Times that some of his members have complained that troopers have pressured them to participated and to report any hotel patrons who speak Spanish and pay in cash. Last week, Attorney General Verniero announced that two troopers had been indicted for falsifying documents in order to make it appear that some of the African American motorists they stopped were white. The two troopers are facing possible criminal charges from an incident in which they shot three unarmed men during a traffic stop. Investigators into this incident noticed that the license plate numbers the officers reported did not always correspond with the motorists they stopped. The state of North Carolina passed a state version of the Traffic Stops Statistics act, becoming the first state in the nation to formally require monitoring of traffic stops patterns. The ACLU has a "Driving While Black" feature section on its web site at http://www.aclu.org/features/dwb.html.
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