Bowling Green police Chief Gary Raymer talks about an officer Wednesday during a press conference at the police station. Officer Robert Jason Hundley has been exonerated on allegations he was involved in racial profiling while with another department. Photo by Joe Imel

The Bowling Green police department has exonerated a police officer accused of racial profiling while with another department. The departments internal investigation cleared Officer Robert Jason Hundley, citing his record of arrests and contacts with city residents during the nine months he has served as a Bowling Green police officer, interviews with Hundley and his former employers at Shelbyville Police Department, city police Chief Gary Raymer said Wednesday. Hundley recently came under scrutiny for his actions during a traffic stop he conducted on a black man while employed as a Shelbyville police officer in September 1999.In our opinion, even though he used a poor choice of phrases in the citation, its my understanding that the suspect (pleaded) guilty and paid the fine, Raymer said. Probable cause is what traffic stops are based on, not the race of people behind the wheel. In my opinion, Officer Hundley did the community a service. In the questioned citation, Hundley said he was alerted to a car when he saw it pull from a primarily Hispanic housing complex; he stopped the car after watching it weave across the center line twice, because he suspected the driver was intoxicated. Raymer said city police investigators checked all of Hundley citations and contact cards during his nine months in Bowling Green and found most of those he talked to and arrested to be white. Of the 346 contact cards Hundley issued since March, 84 percent were to white people. Of the 313 charges issued, around 57 percent were assessed to whites a percentage not consistent with racial profiling, Raymer said. The claims, which originated with WHAS-TV in Louisville, were that Hundley included language in a police report that indicated he stopped a black man because he was leaving a predominantly Hispanic housing complex in Shelbyville. The Daily News didnt carry an Associated Press report on the claims, because it wasnt consistent with the WHAS-TV report or with information the newspaper received. WHAS-TV reporter Mark Hebert broke the story relying on the original police report from the September 1999 arrest and interviews with Shelbyville police Capt. Stewart Shirley, he said. We never used the word reprimand in our story, Hebert said. The police chief told me they talked to him and verbally told him dont do it again. But I dont think they ever placed anything in his file where he was reprimanded. An Associated Press story said Hundley was reprimanded after the incident. The arrest report shows Hundley stopped black motorist Antonio Dixie as he left Wesley Apartments after dropping off three friends in the wee hours of Sept. 13, 1999.Dixie had a blood alcohol level of 0.066 but was arrested for operating a motor vehicle on a suspended operators license and driving without insurance. Dixie said he was stopped because he was black. I said, Sir, what was the reason you pulled me over? Dixie told WHAS-TV. And he said, Because youre black, coming out of Wesley Apartments. I was like, What does that mean? And he was like, Well, if I was white and coming out of (predominantly black) Martinsville, what would that look like?Shirley said the wording on the citation Hundley wrote raised a few eyebrows, but he never was accused of or reprimanded for racial profiling. This was not a case of racial profiling, Shirley said. The officer wrote a citation. Some of the wording in the citation sparked (my interest). I went to a supervisor about it. The supervisor talked to him and the problem was corrected. Mitchell Plumlee of the Daily News contributed information for this article.