COMPROMISE WON'T HALT RACIAL PROFILING.

Byline: EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON Local View

THE American Civil Liberties Union was absolutely right in lambasting state Sen. Kevin Murray's compromise bill on racial profiling. Gov. Gray Davis says that the bill will make it illegal for police to profile blacks and Latinos for traffic stops and will mandate that all law enforcement officers take diversity training classes. The deal cooked up between Davis and Murray is meaningless and disingenuous.

The 14th Amendment and a wave of federal and state anti-discrimination laws already outlaw racial discrimination. For years many police departments, including the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, have required officers to undergo diversity or cultural sensitivity training.

What Davis and Murray are trying to dodge is requiring the California Highway Patrol and local police agencies to collect data on the race of motorists stopped, as well as the reason they were stopped and whether a search and arrest was made.

The LAPD and the L.A. County Sheriff's Department have steadfastly refused to keep racial stats. LAPD Chief Bernard C. Parks flatly says that the LAPD doesn't use racial profiles and has made it virtually a personal crusade to beat back all attempts to require the LAPD to collect statistics on the race of motorists stopped.

Sheriff Lee Baca has been just as intransigent as Parks in opposing collecting racial data. He claims that it's too costly and time-consuming to keep them.

This is a flimsy excuse. Police chiefs in Oakland, San Diego, San Francisco and other California cities already keep racial tallies on the drivers they stop. They have found the time and the money to compile the figures and they have not complained about the cost and effort.

If cost were really such a big obstacle, the California Highway Patrol would probably squawk the loudest. It makes more traffic stops statewide than any other state police agency in the country. Yet CHP officials voluntarily began compiling stats in 1999, and they did it without making any major public outcry.

Davis, Parks and Baca reject keeping the stats because they are probably afraid of what they may find. And with good reason. In recent years, swelling numbers of African-Americans and Latinos, many of them respected elected officials, business people and professionals, including a black state senator and judge, have accused law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles County of targeting them for ``driving while black and brown.''

In Northern California, the ACLU has filed a class-action suit against the CHP on behalf of Latino motorists who claim they were racially targeted.

Nationally, a Justice Department study found that blacks compose about 14 percent of the population, yet account for more than 70 percent of all routine traffic stops.

Racial profiling has ignited more impassioned fury among black and Latino leaders than almost any other issue. It has sparked demonstrations, lawsuits by dozens of black and Latino motorists, denunciations by many state and national officials, and a demand by the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore for Clinton to sign an executive order banning racial profiling.

The practice is so prevalent and damaging that the Justice Department in December wrung a promise out of state officials in New Jersey to stop racially profiling motorists.

But Davis and L.A.'s two top cops know that black and Latino leaders can complain all they want about ``driving while black and brown'' abuses. Yet there's no way for them to prove their claims without producing hard numbers on who's being stopped, the reasons they're stopped, and whether a search and arrest was made as a result of the stop.

The actions of police agencies in California are intently watched and frequently emulated by other police departments across the country. If Davis had showed some gumption and signed an earlier bill by Murray that required law enforcement agencies to collect stats by race on drivers, it could have spurred police and city officials elsewhere who have been foot-dragging on the issue of racial profiling to take action on the problem.

It also would have given Davis the chance to silence once and for all the legions of critics who contend that police agencies routinely harass and intimidate blacks and Latinos on the streets and highways.

The Murray compromise bill is a toothless, face-saving bill that will do nothing to eliminate racial profiling. This is why Davis should reject the bill.