California has settled a long-standing racial profiling lawsuit.

The California Highway Patrol has agreed that its officers will no longer pull over drivers and ask to search their vehicles merely on a hunch they might be carrying drugs or some other contraband, it was announced Thursday.

The agreement is part of the settlement in the federal lawsuit that the ACLU brought against the state over its policy of stopping of minority motorists without just cause--a practice referred to as "DWB" or "driving while black." The settlement is particularly significant because it also contains an agreement by the California Highway Patrol to cease asking for consent to search cars and to stop using minor traffic offenses as a pretext to search for drugs. California is the first state to agree to stop these practices.

The ACLU contended in its lawsuit that giving officers the discretion to seek consent when they did not have probable cause to search resulted in a disproportionate number of motorists of color being subjected to extensive searches, and was a critical component of racial profiling," the ACLU said in a statement. Under the terms of the settlement, the CHP admitted no wrongdoing and agreed only to pay $875,000 in legal fees.

While the CHP maintains the lawsuit failed to establish "a pattern or practice of racial profiling", the ACLU says that through the lawsuit it was able to determine that

intended or not, Latinos were three times as likely to be searched by CHP officers than whites in the agency's Central and Coastal Divisions; African-Americans were approximately twice as likely to be searched in those divisions.