After roughly 100,000 pages of documents yielded 70 hours of public hearings and 160 hours of depositions, the Senate Judiciary Committee inquiry into racial profiling concluded Wednesday. A motion to impeach Verniero could be introduced today, said sponsor Assemblyman William D. Payne, D-Essex. Later, a Temple University criminal-justice professor suggested, to unreceptive senators, that New Jersey should think about making the attorney general an elected office. Fyfe also said the state should outlaw consent searches, which occur when motorists give state troopers permission to examine their cars for drugs or contraband.
Statistics suggest some troopers search minorities at disproportionately high rates.
Martin Cronin, who heads the Office of State Police Affairs in the Attorney General's Office, said lawmakers should allow proposed reforms time to work before deciding whether to eliminate consent searches. He said a consent decree enforced by federal monitors will generate reform, but he said cultural change takes time. Cronin conceded there hasn't been a substantiated allegation of racial profiling by any troopers, though the state concedes it still occurs. I'm not picking on you. You're part of the system.