BY JASON TSAI
STAFF WRITER
THE RECORD

Police in Bergen County are being trained to make traffic stops based on behavioral signs in order to root out criminal motorists.

Experts say that using the tactic of scrutinizing the actions of drivers once they spot a police cruiser will help eliminate racial profiling, which state officials recently said has been all but eradicated among New Jersey cops.

"What the driver does when he sees you, all the little things, is going to give you a lot of clues," Passaic County Sheriff's Officer Marty Elphick said Monday before a gathering of police at the county's Public Safety Academy in Wayne.

Late last year, a committee appointed by Governor Corzine to evaluate a 1999 consent decree ruled the state police had "become largely self-regulating" in the years since a turnpike shooting made the agency synonymous with racial profiling.

Police have tried to lose the racial profiling label ever since the April 1998 incident, in which troopers fired 11 shots into a van carrying four black and Latino men from New York on their way to a basketball tryout in North Carolina.

READ MORE: http://www.northjersey.com/news/crimeandcourts/17378029.html

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