Racial Profiling: Illinois Annual Traffic Stop Report Reprises Same Old Story

In response to complaints about racial profiling by police, law enforcement agencies in Illinois have been required to report on traffic stops since 2004. Every year, the report has found that minority drivers are asked to consent to unwarranted searches at a higher rate than whites, but that police are actually more likely to find contraband in consent searches with white drivers than minorities. The 2008 Traffic Stop Study annual report, released earlier this month, is no different.

The study found that minority drivers were 13% more likely to be stopped than whites, with blacks slightly more likely than Hispanics to be stopped. Blacks were three times more likely to be asked to consent to a search than whites; for Hispanics, that figure was 2.4 times. But contraband was found in only 15.4% of searches of minority-driven vehicles, compared to 24.7% of those with white drivers.

"The fact is every single year we see these same numbers," Ed Yohnka, spokesman for the ACLU of Illinois, told the Chicago Tribune. "There is just a predisposition to believe minorities have contraband... The data and the indisputable nature of this is exactly what the president was talking about the other night."

Yohnka was referring to President Obama's remarks on the arrest of black scholar Henry Louis Gates by a white police officer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last week. As a state senator, Obama led the push for the racial profiling reports. On Wednesday night, he alluded to that work in his remarks on the Gates arrest.

One thing that is different is that the number of consent searches is on the decline. The 2008 figure of 25,471 consent searches (out of 2.5 million traffic stops) is a 33% reduction since 2004.

That's a step in the right direction, but only a small step as far as the ACLU and other civil libertarians and civil rights activists are concerned. They want the state to end the use of consent searches altogether, as has been done by the California Highway Patrol.