Testimony Points to Continuing Bias on the Turnpike
By LAURA MANSNERUS
TRENTON, April 9 - A New Jersey state trooper told a State Senate committee today that racism pervades the upper ranks of the state police and persists in troopers' conduct on the road despite years of federal oversight and new operating procedures.
"There are a lot who feel that people of color or Hispanics are the ones likely to be carrying drugs," said Sgt. Vincent Bellaran, who won a bias suit against the agency and is pursuing another case charging that superiors then retaliated against him.
Testifying that many stops and searches are simply not reported, Sergeant Bellaran told the Senate Judiciary Committee, "Not one person has been brought to this table to answer for any of this."
The sergeant's testimony and several accounts from motorists who said that they were mistreated by state troopers signaled a turn in the committee's hearings as they entered a fourth week. The committee, which is investigating discriminatory law enforcement patterns in traffic stops and searches, focused until today on the state's former attorney general, Peter G. Verniero, and on the events up to the time he acknowledged the problem in 1999.
And until now, discussion of the findings of discrimination had been overtaken by calls for Mr. Verniero's resignation as a State Supreme Court justice - a position his adversaries say he won on the basis of misleading testimony about his response to racial profiling when he was the state's top law enforcement officer.
Justice Verniero has turned aside all requests to step down, including calls last week from the entire Judiciary Committee and from Acting Gov. Donald T. DiFrancesco.
Sergeant Bellaran, who identified himself as Puerto Rican and Filipino, said today that minority troopers were effectively closed out of the force's upper ranks. "You are not allowed to live together in this organization," he said. "You are separated. You are humiliated and belittled. You are not one of them."
Sergeant Bellaran, a trooper for 24 years, with all but eight months of that time on road duty, filed a discrimination lawsuit in his own behalf in 1991, also complaining that white officers who had made racist remarks were never disciplined.
In his testimony today, the sergeant recalled one white trooper's wielding a Bible "and explaining his job was to teach black people a lesson."
He said the state police superintendent, Col. Carson Dunbar, who is black, had done little toward solving racial problems within the agency or in its treatment of minority motorists.
Colonel Dunbar is scheduled to testify on Tuesday. He appeared before the committee last week but was asked today to return.
Sergeant Bellaran was followed by two lawyers, one of whom is black, who had been pulled over by state troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike, and by the brother of a man fighting marijuana possession charges brought after he was stopped and searched.
The two lawyers, Lalia Maher and Felix Morka, said they were driving to New York after a professional conference in 1996 and were pulled from their car, shaken and verbally abused. Ms. Maher said an officer pointed a gun at her head. "They didn't tell us at any point why we were stopped," she said, although Mr. Morka was given a speeding ticket.
When they filed a complaint, Ms. Maher and Mr. Morka said, they were told that it could not be substantiated. They filed a lawsuit in State Superior Court in Trenton that they are now trying to have certified as a class action.
The Judiciary Committee heard testimony tonight from two lawyers from the Garden State Bar Association, a black lawyers group. Ronald Thompson, the organization's president, and Regina Waynes Joseph urged more legislative attention to what Mr. Thompson called "this racial tax."
The latest figures on turnpike stops and searches, released by Attorney General John J. Farmer Jr. in his appearance before the committee last week, show that disparate patterns - almost three in four people searched by troopers are black or Hispanic - continue with little improvement from the time Mr. Verniero issued his report on racial profiling two years ago.
The hearings are to resume Tuesday.