New Jersey Troopers Avoid Jail in Case That Highlighted Profiling

The legal finale to the case today outraged longtime critics of racial profiling. Civil rights leaders have vowed to press state officials to discipline the supervisors who taught racial profiling and to adopt a new law making it a crime.

"This was not justice," said the Rev. Reginald T. Jackson, executive director of the Black Ministers Council of New Jersey. "And we will not stop until justice is ours."

Yet as the criminal charges in the shooting came to an end today, and the Justice Department agreed not to prosecute the troopers, John Hogan, 32, and James Kenna, 31, on federal charges, even civil rights leaders conceded that since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the practice has become even more pervasive. Since Sept. 11, thousands of Middle Eastern men have been apprehended and questioned with little public protest in the government's terrorism investigation.

The two men who began the furor by firing 11 shots into a van carrying black and Latino men from the Bronx on April 23, 1998, publicly acknowledged today for the first time that they had stopped the vehicle because its occupants were black and Latino. The troopers said their supervisors had trained them to focus on black- and brown-skinned drivers because, they were told, they were more likely to be drug traffickers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/15/nyregion/15TROO.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all