By Gregory Korte and Jane Prendergast
The Cincinnati Enquirer

A study of traffic stops by Cincinnati police to be released this morning will show that officers stopped more African-American drivers, but the city's police chief said the report doesn't prove racial profiling.

Chief Tom Streicher said Thursday that he believes the report is inconclusive at best.

Other factors - like the higher crime rates in many African-American neighborhoods - better explain why police officers come into contact with black motorists more often, he said.

"I don't flood certain areas with cops unless I have reason to do so," Streicher said. "A lot of that is driven by citizens' requests for service."

The long-awaited report - sealed by a federal judge until after last week's City Council election - comes 21/2 years after passage of a city law requiring police to fill out a card for every traffic stop. Officers check boxes that record such things as the race, gender and age of drivers and passengers.

Police have since filled out more than 50,000 cards, but the report looks only at the first six months, in 2001 - the year before settlement of a racial profiling lawsuit put many reforms in place.

Plaintiffs in that lawsuit wouldn't comment directly on its findings, citing the gag order in place until the court-appointed monitor formally releases the report at 8:30 a.m.

But Scott Greenwood, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, said the report won't provide the yes-or-no answer many Cincinnatians have looked for since the 2001 riots put police-community relations at the top of the city's agenda.

"The issue is not, and never has been, whether white officers deliberately discriminate against African-American motorists out of racial animus," he said.

"The discussion is whether race is used inappropriately - at whatever level - in policing decisions."

The report, by University of Cincinnati professor John Eck, found that more white drivers were stopped for speeding, while black drivers were stopped more often for equipment violations such as broken taillights, Streicher said.

Many of those black motorists never received a ticket. While police critics may see that as evidence that police were pulling over African-Americans on flimsy grounds, Streicher said those arguments put police in a no-win position.

"How about compassion? Maybe the officer knows if the guy couldn't afford to get a new taillight, he can't pay the ticket."

Other police statistics justify an increased police presence in poorer, African-American neighborhoods, Streicher said. Of all the victims - black and white - who report crimes in Cincinnati, 87 percent say the offender was black.

Today's report will have three components: the Eck analysis, a report by court-appointed police monitor Saul Green, and responses from all three parties to the lawsuit - the city of Cincinnati, the Fraternal Order of Police and the ACLU.

Greenwood said people should look at the report in its entirety.

"We believe that the report is worth a read by anyone who's interested in the issues of race and policing," he said.

FOP President Roger Webster said he's read the report, and it doesn't tell him anything new.

"It doesn't go into the race of the cop as compared to the race of the driver," he said. "Until you get into the cop's head, statistics are going to show what statistics show. When someone runs a red light, the odds are that a cop doesn't know what color he is. He could be blue for all we know. But traffic enforcement is part of policing. Traffic enforcement saves lives."

Eck is expected to recommend further study - which is likely to start the debate over the racial profiling ordinance all over again.

"If you add up all the time that officers have spent filling out all the cards, it amounts to a cop's time for two years," Webster said.

"You're taking a cop away from doing things he could be doing to protect the community."

But Greenwood said new technology will allow police to punch in the data directly on cruiser terminals, allowing more timely and precise analysis.

"This study is based on 2-year-old data. It's going to tell us what happened in that time frame, not what's happening today. We will be doing this throughout the next five years and beyond," he said. "It's critically important - and not just the report. It will help us find, we hope, the few truly bad apples."

E-mail gkorte@enquirer.com and jprendergast@enquirer.com