DWB: Driving While Black

By Harriet Barovick

Let me make this very clear," announced Maryland's chief state trooper, Colonel David Mitchell, to a group of reporters last week. "The Maryland state police has not, does not, nor will it ever condone the use of race-based profiling" in stopping cars on highways.

Yeah, sure, responded skeptical African Americans, from U.S. Congressmen to manual laborers.

Mitchell was responding to a federal lawsuit filed last week by 11 black motorists and backed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Maryland N.A.A.C.P. The suit claims that state troopers, who have stepped up efforts to nail drug couriers, have targeted blacks on Interstate 95, a favored route for weapon and drug smuggling.

The colonel's denial echoed recent declarations made by police in other states but did little to convince black drivers in Maryland and elsewhere. Profiling--a police practice of viewing certain characteristics as indicators of criminal behavior--is common across the U.S. But authorities uniformly deny that race is one of the characteristics. "It's a shell game," says Bill Mertens, lead outside counsel for the A.C.L.U. in the case against Maryland. "Police use profiling sloppily and rely on racial characteristics in totally illegal ways."

The issue gained momentum in April when state troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike shot at and wounded two blacks and a Hispanic in a van pulled over for speeding. The incident sparked protests just as the issue, dubbed by victims as "DWB"--driving while black--had caught Washington's attention.

Earlier this year the House of Representatives passed a bill that would require the government to monitor race data on searches across the country. Representative John Conyers Jr. argued, "There are virtually no African-American males--including Congressmen, actors, athletes and office workers--who have not been stopped at one time or another for...driving while black."

Marshaling numbers from the state troopers' own records, the plaintiffs in the Maryland case presented dizzying facts: while 75% of the drivers on I-95 are white, only 23% of those that troopers stopped and searched from 1995 to 1997 were white; 17% of drivers are black, yet 70% of those pulled over were black. State police countered with statistics showing that troopers stopped twice as many whites as blacks in 21 months ending in March.

One of the plaintiffs, Philadelphian Gary Rodwell, who uses I-95 once a week to take his seven-year-old son in Baltimore to Cub Scout meetings, told TIME he was enraged at being stopped: "In spite of everything I've done to live on the right side of the law, someone has made a decision that I'm not worthy of freely traveling on I-95.

"People stood up against injustice in our community before us," says Rodwell. "It's our responsibility to do the same thing for those who come behind."

--By Harriet Barovick. With reporting by Elizabeth Rudulph

With reporting by Elizabeth Rudulph