U.S. DOJ vs. Montgomery County Police and vs. Color Blind Justice

Be sure to also see More on Montgomery Profiling at the bottom of this page.
Also see Highland Park, Illinois below.

CHRONOLOGY:

• In 1996, the NAACP decided that too many traffic citations were being issued to black motorists in Montgomery County, Maryland.  The NAACP complained to their friends at Bill Clinton's U.S. Department of Justice.

• In 1996, based on the NAACP's unsubstantiated complaint, the U.S. Dept. of Justice launched a very expensive three-year investigation into the Montgomery County Department of Police.

• In December 1997, the NAACP revolving door:  Bill Lann Lee, former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, became the acting head of the U.S. DOJ's Office of Civil Rights!   Lee took over the ongoing investigation into Montgomery County Police.  Lee's prior record as an employee of the NAACP should have disqualified him from this investigation due to his proven bias against non-minorities.  There is no way that Bill Lann Lee could have been objective in investigating the NAACP's unsubstantiated charges against this police department.  (DOJ avoided mentioning Mr. Lee's former employment by the NAACP in any of its press releases about this non-case.)

• Summer 1999, the liberal democratic Montgomery County Council hired a new black police chief, Charles Moose.   Moose is a long time friend of the liberal, pro-diversity U.S. Department of Justice, and Moose actively promotes "diversity training" for police officers.   His resume reveals that he strongly favors good racial profiling (profile everybody) in order to defeat bad racial profiling.  The Montgomery County chapter of the NAACP loved Mr. Moose.  Moose was hired largely to help defuse the NAACP's accusations (not proof, but accusations only) of racial bias by the Montgomery County police.  Even Clinton's U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno pitched in to help convince the Montgomery County council to hire Charles Moose.  (See also:  Charles Moose and the Racial Profiling Puzzle)

• In October 1999, after three years of a fruitless investigation, the DOJ presented its findings to Montgomery County.  The report stated, in part, that the U.S. Department of Justice found no evidence that Montgomery County police used excessive force in a series of cases involving minorities.  According to the Washington Post, DOJ investigators "found no evidence of a policy -- "written or unwritten" in the words of one source -- that encouraged racial discrimination by officers or specific acts by officers that amounted to civil rights violations."   An anonymous county official was quoted as saying "We can't believe the Justice Department wants us to stop issuing tickets to people who break the law simply because we bump up against a racial or ethnic cap."  DOJ did find that 21% of all traffic stops in the county involved black motorists.  Lacking any other evidence against the county, DOJ made a huge deal out of the fact that only 12% of the county population is black. DOJ did not even question whether black motorists do, in fact, commit more traffic infractions than other drivers in the county.

• On Nov. 3, 1999 the Montgomery County Department of Police was presented the Civil Rights Award in Law Enforcement by the International Chiefs of Police Association.  The IACP Civil Rights Award is “bestowed upon the law enforcement organization and /or individual who demonstrates exemplary performance in the investigation and/or prevention of civil rights crimes, the enforcement of civil rights statutes, and educational efforts regarding civil rights issues.”  The review committee commented, “Your agency’s dedication and commitment to the ideals of professional law enforcement, cognizant of its responsibility to be responsive to the community you serve, provided the basis for this decision.”  Not coincidentally, Montgomery's brand-new black police chief, Charles Moose, had been a long-time friend and activist within the IACP -- Moose had previously served on the IACP's Civil Rights Committee.

• On Friday, Jan. 14, 2000 the Montgomery County Department of Police signed an allegedly voluntary "Memorandum of Agreement" with the U.S. Dept. of Justice wherein all the parties agreed no one was guilty of anything.   Nonetheless, the agreement calls for Montgomery County Police to perform good racial profiling (record the race) on all motorists they stop for any traffic infraction.  This intrusive federal requirement is to continue indefinitely, according to the DOJ agreement with the county.

• Friday, June 23, 2000:   Adversity.Net is still waiting for Department of Justice officials to return our phone calls asking for a complete copy of the report of DOJ's investigation into the Montgomery County Department of Police.  If we ever get it, we'll post it here.

UPDATE June 6, 2002:

          Two and a half years ago, Bill Clinton’s DOJ forced a "voluntary" agreement with the Montgomery County Police to record the race or ethnicity of all traffic violators. Clinton’s DOJ hoped to prove that black drivers passing through Montgomery County do not, in fact, commit more traffic violations than white drivers.

          However, according to the latest data released by Montgomery County Police, black drivers on county roads continue to commit traffic violations at a higher rate than whites. This fact emerges in spite of the onerous, intrusive Clinton DOJ "safeguards" imposed on county police to prevent so-called "bad racial profiling" of drivers.

          The liberal Washington Post reported this fact in typically biased fashion in the first paragraph of its story:   "The latest set of Montgomery County traffic stop data shows that black drivers continue to be stopped at a rate higher than their proportion of the county population or registered drivers."

          The Post summarized recent Montgomery County black traffic stops as follows:

          The Washington Post grudgingly reported at the bottom of today's story: "Police leaders have argued that relatively high numbers of black drivers may be getting stopped because there are also nonresident black drivers who travel through Montgomery, particularly from the [neighboring] District [of Columbia] and [neighboring] Prince George's County." [Emphasis added.]

          The Post story continues:   "Police Chief Charles A. Moose has repeatedly stated that police are not engaging in racial profiling. He said last week that if people falsely think that police are manipulating the data, then "we're consistently manipulating the data."

          "It's fair," he said of the traffic stops. "It's based on the behavior of the drivers."

          "Moose said that the overall demographic breakdown of stops does not differ much from statistics of stops made by radar or citations resulting from red-light cameras, which police refer to as "low discretionary stops." He said a comparison of the numbers shows that police are not biased."

          Predictably, county police are having trouble "properly classifying" its citizens by silly and useless racial criteria.  According to the Washington Post story: "Capt. Tom Fitzpatrick said that officials discovered that despite previous training, some officers were marking American Indian, rather than Asian, when they stopped immigrants from India, Pakistan or other central Asian countries. The field on their hand-held computers simply said "Indian," not "American Indian."

[Excerpted from the Washington Post story 6/6/02]

Last Known Link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-dyn/articles/A64798-2002Jun5.html

Sidebar:   Recently, George W. Bush's DOJ (under John Ashcroft) suppressed a commissioned study of New Jersey Turnpike traffic stops because the study showed that blacks did, in fact, commit more traffic violations than whites.

          The suppressed New Jersey study was objective in the extreme:  photos of the stopped drivers were submitted to a panel of three citizens in order to objectively identify the race or ethnicity of the driver.

          The NAACP was predictably outraged, and issued ridiculous criticisms of the study such as "Windshield glare prevented the panel from properly identifying the race/ethnicity of the drivers."

          Adversity.Net does NOT care about the color of the traffic violators.  Nor should you.  What we do care about is the efforts by the massive racial special-interest lobby (NAACP, et al) which continues to attempt to dismiss criminal behavior because of skin color.