Study: Minorities more likely to get tickets, have vehicles searched
ART GOLAB Staff Reporter/agolab@suntimes.com July 13, 2011 10:44PM
| SUN-TIMES FILE
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Updated: July 20, 2011 4:38PM
After a traffic stop, minority drivers are more likely to get handed a ticket and their vehicles are more likely to get searched, according to a study released this month by the Illinois Department of Transportation.
The study of all 2010 traffic stops in the state of Illinois showed that white drivers who were stopped got tickets 55 percent of the time, while minority motorists who were stopped got tickets 63 percent of the time.
Among minorities, Hispanics fared the worst, getting tickets 65 percent of the time, with black and Asian motorists coming in at 62 percent.
However, Chicago cops appeared to be more even-handed, dishing out tickets to 65 percent of both white and minority motorists who were stopped.
The study showed that consent searches were involved in less than 1 percent of all traffic stops. However, statewide, minority drivers were nearly twice as likely to undergo such searches.
In Chicago the disparity was much greater, with minority drivers six times more likely to be searched than white motorists.
In a such a search, the police officer typically does not have probable cause to make an involuntary search and so requests the driver’s permission, which the data shows is granted more than 95 percent of the time.
Despite the fact that minority motorists’ vehicles were searched more frequently, police had greater success searching white motorists’ vehicles, according to the data. Chicago police turned up contraband in 29 percent of the searches of white motorists’ vehicles, vs. a 24 percent success rate searching minority drivers’ vehicles.
This was true also statewide, with police discovering contraband 25 percent of the time in white drivers’ vehicles and 19 percent in minority motorists’ vehicles.
The new data prompted the Illinois American Civil Liberties Union to add to a complaint it filed in June with the Justice Department, requesting an investigation into how the Illinois State Police handle searches.
The complaint noted that in 2009, Hispanics were three times more likely than whites to undergo consent searches by state police. The new numbers showed little change, ACLU legal director Harvey Grossman said Wednesday.
“The problem with consent searches is that they’re based on hunches and they allow a lot of subjectivity,” Grossman said.
“Whether it’s intentional or unconscious, I think it’s quite obvious that they suspect drivers of color to be engaged in transporting contraband more frequently than they suspect white drivers. But in fact they’re wrong more of the time with minority drivers than they are with white drivers.”
In the wake of the ACLU complaint, Gov. Pat Quinn asked the state police to review the issue, and state police spokeswoman Monique Bond said the agency hopes to have the results of the review in the next few weeks.
A state law, pushed by then State Sen. Barack Obama, mandated the collection of racial data for every traffic stop. It has been in effect since 2004 and was intended to provide information that would identify racial profiling.
“This gives a chance for communities to make some judgments about whether or not there are some racial disparities,” said Alexander Weiss, a consultant and coauthor of the annual study of the data, which is published by the University of Illinois at Chicago Center for Research in Law and Justice.
But all motorists, white or minority, can take heart from one aspect of the data: It showed 92,703 fewer stops were made statewide than in 2009, a 4 percent drop. In Chicago, the decrease was even more significant, with the department conducting 31,470 fewer stops, a 16 percent reduction.
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