Some African-Americans joke that law enforcement has created a special category of traffic violation for them — DWB or driving while black. Now, they have data to back it up.

A new federal Bureau of Justice Statistics survey of traffic stops shows that although police stop black, white and Hispanic drivers at the same rate, minorities are much more likely to be searched and ticketed. Of drivers pulled over in 2005, the Bureau of Justice's Police-Public Contact Survey shows that police searched 9.5 percent of the black drivers and 8.8 percent of Hispanics, compared to 3.6 percent of whites.

A logical rationale might be that the black and Hispanic drivers give police more reason to suspect criminal activities and commence a search. But the data doesn't bear out that assumption since only about one in 10 searches during a traffic stop uncovers evidence of a possible crime.

With 90 percent of the searches failing to turn up any evidence of wrongdoing, the question has to be raised: What prompts police to search the cars of so many blacks and Hispanics?

The Justice Department traffic stop survey also shows that police ticket and arrest blacks and Hispanics more often than whites. Police arrest 4.5 percent of black drivers and 3.1 percent of Hispanics, compared to 2.1 percent of whites. Conversely, white drivers were more likely to leave a traffic stop with only a warning.

Black and Hispanic drivers are less likely than whites to agree that police behaved properly during a traffic stop, probably because they believe there is a double standard at work.

Georgia and other states ought to monitor their criminal justice systems for racial profiling, starting with how kids are treated in their very first brush with the law.

The research shows that the law and the courts often cut youthful white offenders a break, but push minority kids into the criminal justice system, which can derail their education and their futures. For example, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that white kids — ages 12 to 17 — use and sell drugs more than their black peers. In fact, white teens were a third more likely in the past year to have sold drugs than black teens. Yet, black teens are arrested for drugs at about twice the rate of whites and account for nearly half of kids jailed for drugs in the juvenile system.

Despite such troubling statistics, some people insist that blacks and Hispanics exaggerate racial profiling and trade on their minority status to evade responsibility. Hence all the jabber on the radio about minorities pulling out the "race card." But, as the traffic stop data proves, if there's any card at play, it's clearly not a "get out of jail" card.

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— Maureen Downey, for the editorial board