Panel Criticizes NYPD Racial Profiling

Guiliani Says Report 'Bears No Relation To Reality'

(AP)  The New York Police Department improperly uses racial profiling to stop and question people, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded Friday.

This police tactic is a factor in the racial tensions that can lead to "tragic and unnecessary" incidents like the shooting of Amadou Diallo, according to a report approved 6-2 by the advisory panel.

The report also calls into question department training and recruitment of black and Hispanic officers. It recommends creation of an independent office to investigate accusations that police wrongly used deadly force.

"Once again the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has embarrassed itself by releasing a report that bears no relation to reality," Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said in a statement Friday.

Giuliani said the commission was formed to study his police department's practices in the aftermath of the Diallo shooting, and since then it has "held only one meeting, conducted over the course of a single day."

That, plus the acquittal of the four officers involved in Diallo's shooting, calls into question the validity of the commission's report, Giuliani said.

Reviewing the department's "stop and frisk" tactics, the report found that blacks and Hispanics were stopped far out of proportion to their representation in a given community.

For example, 51 percent of people stopped and searched in the Staten Island in 1998 were black, while the borough's population is only 9 percent black.

The commission chairwoman, Mary Frances Berry, said evidence indicated that such rates of minority searches belied police contentions that blacks and Hispanics were stopped more frequently because they matched the descriptions of crime victims.

"They simply stop who they think they should stop," Berry said, reading from the report. "The NYPD needs to be careful not to engage in racial profiling of this sort…It not only violates the law but undermines respect for the police and can cause deadly altercations, as in the tragic and unnecessary police shooting of Amadou Diallo."

Diallo was shot and killed outside his Bronx home on Feb. 4, 1999, struck 19 times in a hail of 41 shots from police officers. The four officers involved in the shooting were acquitted earlier this year.

Commission members Carl Anderson and Russell Redenbaugh voted against the report.

Like Giuliani and top city police officials, Redenbaugh said he did not think the conclusions of racial profiling were supported by the facts. He also gave officials credit for New York's sharp drop in murder and other serious crimes.

"The notion that the racial mix of ho you stop ought to resemble the racial mix of the people in the neighborhood is a specious use of statistics," Redenbaugh said. "I don't know if there is racial profiling or not."

The commission's report also found that unlike other major cities, New York's police department has not fully adopted community policing practices that minimize racial tensions and that its training program "reinforces stereotypes instead of undermining them."

The report also recommended police recruits earn at least a two-year college degree. The commission found that officers without that minimum education level are more likely to have misconduct complaints.

When he was a candidate for the U.S. Senate, Guiliani accused chairperson Berry of playing politics with the commission's investigation, since she had given money to the campaign of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who would have been his opponent in the race.

Federal Election Commission records indicate Berry gave Clinton $250 in September 1999. She also gave to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the presidential campaign of Vice President Al Gore.