New
Jersey
Racial
Profiling
Documents
Go
Online:
Historic
Opportunity
for
Activists,
Researchers,
Public
12/15/00
The past few weeks have seen what one media outlet described as a "floodlight" of attention on the issue of racial profiling on New Jersey highways. Fueling the discussion, which has been particularly intense in the New Jersey media, was the release to the public, this past November 27th, of 91,000 pages of documents collected by the NJ Attorney General's office. That floodlight now promised to turn into a spotlight aimed at details of the archive's contents, as DRCNet posts the entire 91,000-page archive to its web site. David Borden, DRCNet Executive Director, explained, "We decided to make the profiling archive available on our web site, so that civil rights organizers, media, attorneys and other concerned citizens worldwide could take advantage of the unprecedented opportunities these documents afford." Documents reveal the US Department of Justice (DOJ) as both hero and villain in the profiling debacle. While DOJ's civil rights division has taken a leading role in opposing racial profiling, the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), another branch of DOJ, has overtly encouraged police forces around the country to use race-based profiling techniques, as part of its controversial "Operation Pipeline." Subsequent issues of the Week Online will link to specific documents revealing DEA's role in encouraging profiling. The New Jersey Racial Profiling Archive was previously available only by on-site inspection at the Attorney General's office, or on CD-ROM provided only to media outlets at $1,000 per set. The documents can now be accessed via DRCNet's web site at http://www.stopthedrugwar.org/njprofiling/. Recent DRCNet coverage of this issue can be found at http://www.drcnet.org/wol/163.html#profilingappeals, http://www.drcnet.org/wol/162.html#njprofiling, and http://www.drcnet.org/wol/160.html#njprofiling. Other profiling news links can be found on our profiling site at http://www.stopthedrugwar.org/njprofiling/index.html#news.
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