Driving While White

by Alexander Cockburn

Not far out of Butte, I could see the state trooper behind me. He kept his car just to my left rear so that my natural reaction was to run a little farther right to the edge of the inside lane. His light went on. The trooper said that I had driven across the inside white line of the interstate verge. This was the pretext.

Then, he hemmed and hawed a bit and asked if I was carrying large sums of money. I laughed and said, "I wish." By this time, we'd gravitated to the back end of the car, and he was looking hopefully at the trunk. Was I carrying arms? Absolutely not. Truth be told, I remembered I had half a bottle of gin in the trunk and wondered whether it was illegal in the state of Montana. Then, he blurted out hopefully, "Are you carrying large amounts of drugs?" "No," I replied. Though I was unshaven, wearing dark glasses and driving a boat, he didn't order me to open up. Maybe it's because I'd told him I was a writer. He saw a red stain on my fingers and cried out, "Is that blood?" I said no, it was ink and showed him the fountain pen, and that broke his spirit.

Here's where we get to Operation Pipeline, as described by Gary Webb in this month's Esquire.

It's clear enough to me that Pipeline is why I was stopped in Montana, Washington and Oregon, and why, for every middle-class white guy like myself, a hundred blacks or Hispanics are pulled over. In Operation Pipeline, millions and millions of federal Drug Enforcement Agency dollars and training sessions by the thousand have sent cops out on the roads alert for the trace signs that supposedly spell "drug carrier." Webb says that 301 police commands in 48 states participate in Pipeline in some fashion.

It took shape back in the 1980s with a Florida cop called Robert Vogel, who had a sensitive eye to those drivers on Florida's I-95 that might be in line for a stop and a search. Of course, as Webb makes amusingly and brutally clear, the basic rule is stop and hassle the blacks and the browns, but there are other criteria:

• Will a driver make eye contact with the cop driving in the next lane -- a cop, furthermore, who's eyeballing him? No eye contact increases the chance of the red light going on. So do hands high on the wheel in the ten-to-two position, knuckles white and, presumably, an over-orderly speed.

• Air fresheners, laundry detergent, fabric softeners.

• Fast food wrappers on the floor. This is evidence of "hard travel."

• Maps with cities circled. Drug drops.

• Tools on the floor. New tires on an old car. High mileage on a new car.

• Single key in the ignition.

• Rental cars.

• Signs of fear, unease. Pornography. Young women.

"By the way, you wouldn't happen to have any guns or drugs in your car, would you?

"Me? you will ask. Oh, no. Of course not.

"The officer will look at you and say, Then, you don't mind if I take a look-see do you? Most drivers consent. This can authorize a complete search of everything, including your luggage and person."

In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court OK'd Vogel's method of stopping people for minor breaches of the vehicle codes in order to check for drugs. Antonin Scalia wrote the opinion, saying it was not the role of the court to say whether there were too many trivial traffic laws on the books. Webb reports that after this case, known as the Whren decision, a California Highway Patrol instructor told him, "After Whren, the game was over. We won." Two weeks ago, Scalia wrote another opinion, this time OK'ing the search of passengers in a car, without a warrant.

Goodbye, Fourth Amendment, unless the pretexts are taken away. There will, I think, be new laws. Stop a thousand black people, and you're bound to snag some off-duty cops or lawyers. In the end, someone (many are now being helped by the ACLU) will fight back. Police chiefs and Attorney General Janet Reno are expressing concern. My question: Where is the best value-for-money organization in America, the AAA? It needs heat, too, since it should be protecting all its members.