Being denounced as virtual Klansmen, the state troopers demanded a real study.
Confident that any new study would merely serve to confirm the troopers' racism, the DOJ and the New Jersey attorney general commissioned a statistical investigation from the Public Services Research Institute in Maryland.
The institute's study was a spectacular thing. Using expensive monitors with high-speed cameras and radar detectors, they clocked the speeds of nearly 40,000 drivers on the relevant section of the turnpike. Three researchers then examined the photos to determine the race of the driver -- without knowing whether the driver was speeding, which was defined as going more than 80 mph in 65 mph zones.
The result: No racial profiling.
Blacks constituted 25 percent of all speeders and they were 23 percent of drivers stopped for speeding. Controlling for age and gender, blacks sped at about twice the rate of whites. The racial disparity was even greater for drivers exceeding 90 mph.
Inasmuch as the study was irrefutable, Mark Posner, a lefty Clinton holdover in the Bush Justice Department, tried to block it from being released, continuously demanding more information.
But no matter how statisticians fiddled with the data, the results were identical: Blacks were twice as likely to speed as whites -- and at much higher speeds. The troopers were completely vindicated.
When the study finally leaked -- over Posner's objections -- he informed the press it wasn't "valid" without articulating any actual problems with it. The attorney general of New Jersey, David Samson, nonsensically said the results didn't matter because New Jersey had already admitted its troopers were engaging in racial profiling.
Perhaps the Times is right and there is no comprehensive study of police shootings by race. But it's also possible that there is one, it didn't come out as planned, so it has never seen the light of day.
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